skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not necessarily true. I've helped several friends with less than US$1000 in startup funds open restaurants/bakeries...within 2 years of when they started out to do so.

Ego, lack of creativity, and laziness are among the only impediments to starting most businesses. You just have to want the end result bad enough that you are willing to work hard on a smaller scale until you can fund your dream. (You can work as a caterer, personal chef, food delivery service, and/or sell your food on consignment at other locations to raise the funds for your own place. MANY restaurants will let you borrow their kitchens for 'free' in exchange for cleaning up or for doing prep work or cooking specialty items. Some may want you to cover the increased insurance risk, but you can still get started in a licensed facility for a small cash outlay. Most independent restauranteurs understand what it is like to start a new food-related business, and many are likely to help you out unless you're an ass or a direct competitor. Then, you can just build up a base of customers and cash until you can buy or lease your own place. If you have good products, and are smart with your cash, it doesn't actually take too long to get enough of a bankroll to go out on your own. It took one of my friends only 11 months as a 'virtual cupcake consignment company' to MAKE the funds she needed to open her own bakery, and she even bought her real estate outright.)

Side note: One of the ladies I assisted in starting her own bakery ended up closing it and going back to bakery consignment and catering because it was less stressful and more lucrative for her than retail. Some of these "ramp up" businesses may be better in the long run than actually owning your own retail/restaurant space.
So why is the bump necessary, vs just both people turning the app on and being in proximity to each other? Or is that just the gimmick?
Yeah - my experience is that most startups (including my own) really do fail because of the founder's stupidity, but it's very hard to avoid that stupidity even if you know this. There're so many balls you have to keep in the air as a founder, you're bound to drop some of them. It's only after you've practiced through a few failures and can instinctively avoid some of the more obvious failure modes that you start having a reasonable chance of success.
What kind of application you want to develop? We are NY based company developing iPhone apps. We have currently 24 apps on the appstore. You can click on my nickname for more information.
Currently how big is your market here? How many ppl have an Internet centric phone vs. a regular handset?

Are you looking 3 to 5 years into the future re: market potential?
Google OS Could Put Squeeze on Other Flavors of Linux
I love the term "Lifestyle Entrepreneur" and I wear it with pride. There was a time when I thought it was all about raising investment money. Then I realized that such a prospect was completely outside of reality, and furthermore, I didn't need the money. Then I just hunkered down and got to work.

Feel free to rename it if you want, but I'll stick with the original.
We all know entrepreneurship entails huge risks. However, that's no reason to not forge ahead. Most people can't seem to understand that entrepreneurship is not about money, fame or power. Those are all secondary things. Entrepreneurship is about an idea and its development. It's about developing a thought, a concept only you and maybe the 2 other people starting the venture with you understand. It takes balls and passion. It takes courage. But more importantly, it takes unrelenting love. Love for the idea behind the venture, love for the concept of creating something valuable out of just abstractions, and, ultimately, love for the better world you're helping shape with the economic impact of your plan.

I'm not downplaying the importance of following sound economic principles (e.g. do NOT put your house as a collateral for a loan). Nonetheless, if you're going to be deterred by the economy, your wife, this article, or a friend, then you clearly don't have, and probably never had, what it takes.
"I'd like to hire a Swedish PhD to sit down and do this test, he would get 1 or 2 out of 9"

Wouldn't that be the expected result? A PhD is probably not the best suited person for a career in military.
Are there any others like it that also post the code?
Linux is NOT an operating system, its a kernel. GNU/LINUX is, however.
I have always preferred "Lifestyle" to "Trojan." Wait, what were we talking about?
Would You Miss Windows With a Google Operating System?
PCI stands for "Payment Card Industry", and is a shorthand for the PCI Data Security Standards, which are a set of rules that every vendor above a certain size has to follow in order to process payments with a Visa or Mastercard.

PCI auditors are people working for one of the 20-30-odd firms that are certified by Visa to audit compliance to the PCI DSS.
Does Being Free Cheapen Google's Brand?
The research paper that the newscientist article is referring to ( http://arxiv.org/pdf/0810.4179v2 ) points to some resonance behavior of memristors' "LC contour". I don't understand memristors very well, but it seems that the only connection between memristors and the amoeba's "predictive" behavior is resonance, if there is a connection at all.
While memristors are cool and may in fact help us understand / mimic the learning ability of animals, the amoeba's ability to "predict" external forces is a weak, weak link.
I'd hardly call it fast, but true. The only 'fancy feature' I use in LaunchBar is it's speed :)
I don't want to broaden this too much, but you feel the BBC has to support Saf 1.3 with 0% market share because you don't want to force a software update on those 80 odd people whilst on the other hand transitioning to digital forcing a hardware change/purchase on the entire user base?? Seems a bit of a weak argument.

If indeed (as reading between the lines you appear to suggest) if a javascript framework needs to be hobbled to support screenreaders (good!) and obsolete browsers (bad!) then it may not be right to weigh in with one of the top frameworks. But you asked them first though right?

"More or Less" is great. But if commercial radio had a free-to-air program "Less or More" and the only difference was that you transmit at a frequency that's better for reception on crystal sets then I'd hope the BBC wouldn't bother but would add to the diversity of broadcasting some other way.
I'm pretty sure PayPal has had micropayments for a while - I remember registering a separate micropayment-rate account at least a year ago.
How well does this scale?

They sortof glossed over the ninjitsu that is being used to link the two "bumps" together. My guess is that (since internet access is required), it syncs a clock within the bump application to the bump server, then looks for phones that were "bumped" at the same time.

I'm sure I'm wrong, and would love to hear of other ways that this is happening.

If I'm not, how does this scale up to the millions or hundreds of millions of users that it would require to actually replace the business card (which is what it sounds like it wants to do).

Even if it isn't at millions, how well does it function at events where lots and lots of people are "bumping" (clever name, I have already verbed it)?

Finally...and this is what would--to me--kill it: the blackberry does not have an accelerometer. :(
I disagree. If that were the case prices would have gone down, not up.

Since netbooks surfaced there has been feature creep and price creep.
Ironically, the borrowers just acted according to incentives, as did bankers. Everyone knew fannie/freddie would get bailed out if mortgages went south, and this fact drastically reduced anyone's incentive to care about how risky MBSs were.

There is moral hazard created by the way bankruptcy law works (for people who are significantly underwater) and also in banking regulations (and GSEs).
Totally. They are both awesome. It's fun to be a part of both "cultures" :)
I don't understand the downvotes here.

I mean, obviously, you're correct.

But the NYT just said that entrepreneurship means caring more about your dreams than a house for your family.

Really? That's the decision people have to make to start a business? If you don't do that, you aren't an entrepreneur?

It's a great cautionary tale, but as you yourself point out, not all kinds of business have that risk. And as others point out, his problems were avoidable.

So, the NYT is wrong. Right?
Google and "Don't be Evil": Interview with Eric Schmidt
"being fat is not even about overeating, as long as you put in the effort to workout to burn those calories, you can eat whatever you want and still remain in shape."

Do the math. It's not too difficult to snack along, have three meals a day, and end up with 6000-8000 calories. Assuming you're a big guy, you might have a 2500-calorie base metabolism, and burn maybe another (being generous) 1500 calories a day in normal movement. That means you have to exercise specifically to burn 1000-3000 calories a day. If you run for 800 calories an hour, you'll have to run for hours every day just to burn off what you're eating.

It's completely impractical to try to burn as much as you could eat.
Russelldb: "I'm glad they open sourced it but what use is it to anyone?"

I'll bet they can include "using Glow in a large corporate environment for 2 years" as a requirement on all dev jobs in the new media arm that have to be advertised outside too. Nice move.

code-monkey manager: 'we need pay increases to retain talent because devs with Glow familiarity can't be found anywhere' ...

Probably a bit over-cynical.
Don't understand why "netbooks are going the way of the dodo" and "the race to the bottom will make them disappear". The race to the bottom will shake up the market and make the industry more competitive, but shipping cheap netbooks that low-end laptop shoppers want (and can't distinguish between except on binary acceptibility and price!) is a dominant strategy.
Could you make the process any more complicated? I hear there's this thing called Bluetooth and all you have to do is activate it and zap the phone directly with it. Why communicate with the "cloud" at all?
Visa and Mastercard control most of all the credit card transactions in the world and they both charge merchants a percentage (e.g. 1.5%) PLUS a small fixed fee (e.g. 40c). It's that small fixed fee that makes it pointless for $1 transactions cause you just lose too much.
Self Employment.
Biz cards are a pain in the butt:

1) You've got to design and pay to print them. If titles or contact info changes, that's a re-print. The cost matters a lot particularly to the SoHo market.

2) You've got to carry them around with you everywhere to hand out. Usually this is in a metal case that's kinda cumbersome in a pocket shared with an iPhone/BlackBerry already.

3) When someone hands you one, you've gotta stick it in your pocket and not lose it.

4) After you bring them to your office, you need to file them somehow (scan them, manually enter them into Outlook/whatever).

I've seen people at hedge funds buy expensive scanners which plug into Outlook and let you scan this stuff in. It does OCR on the cards and auto-creates contacts for you. The scanners are around $200/each, plug into your desktop, and are a tad annoying to install and config. The cards get tossed into the trash the moment it's in Outlook.

If you don't buy a scanner for every employee, that's time wasted while they type said card info into Outlook.

While something like this won't "kill" business cards in the business world, it'll offer a nice alternative.

Here's an idea for an iPhone App that'll let someone with an iPhone do-away with biz cards all together: A scanner app using the iPhone camera. Take a snapshot* of someone's biz card, OCR it, and bam, it's in your contacts. Easier said than done, of course. But it eliminates steps 3 and 4 above, making your life easier when dealing with "legacy" business cards. :)

*Yeah, yeah, we all know how good the iPhone camera is at close-ups. Maybe the next revision? ;)
It should be: "don't borrow money, unless you really have to". Try to start a laser / semiconductor / biotech company without borrowing money...
I have not once, and I am not exaggerating once seen a person who logically should be fit as they ate healthily and exercised an adequate amount and was still obese, ever.

Every obese person I've ever known ate crap and didn't exercise at all. And when they tried to get thin they would either half-ass it or do the latest fad diet for 2 weeks or something and get right back to where they were later.
i agree. i don't find the term lifestyle business demeaning.

i've had some lifestyle businesses in the past that have done really well, and frankly, when you have a really successful lifestyle business, if someone treats you condescendingly, sitting at the beach drinking pina coladas at 11am on a weekday is a great remedy.
Business cards are about more than data in many parts of the world. Japan, for example.
something like this is hardly an alternative, since it requires everyone to own the iphone(hardly a cheap toy) and the app.
The Linux blowback is crazy to me. Follow my logic here (because the first sentence seems crazy but I think it makes sense in the end):

Chrome is not really a Linux Distribution. Sure they're using Linux. Why not? It's a core that's well tested and does everything they need it to do. But the very reason they're picking it is because they don't care about that part of the equation.

They're using Linux to jump right to the part they're interested in which is a Web OS.

But they aren't trying to be another version of Linux or any Desktop OS for that matter. They're just using Linux as a stable infrastructure to build their OS on top of. So it's not a Linux distribution in the traditional sense. Meaning it's not really a replacement for anyone who was interested in a Linux netbook.

It's a third option not a Linux replacement
easy fix: create empty file cm and add this to named.conf (if running bind, you can probably work it out for others).

zone "cm" {
type master;
file "master/cm";
};
I'm firm in my belief that at least one of the main reasons for Chrome was to kick things up in the browser market, rather than a serious attempt to grab browser market share. "Look, you're doing it all wrong, just give it here a moment... ok, you can have it back now." And it worked - Apple, Microsoft and Mozilla all scrambled to include some, if not all of the features that identified Chrome, which were the features that made it use Google's services more effectively.

I'm fairly sure that a part of this (and, to a lesser extent, Android) is a similar deal.
> Linus Tordalv started working on Linux back in 1991 when he was a high school student in his native Denmark. That's nearly twenty years ago, and the shit still doesn't run right

That's kind of ironic when you that his own blog on blogspot runs on linux.
?? My non VC funded company has 20 employees...
I vote for "Business"
Unfortunately, the jQuery.noConflict(true) method breaks almost all plugins.
Look at the FAQ: http://www.bumptechnologies.com/faq.phtml

Sounds like they're matching the timing and "type" or "intensity" of the bump using the accelerometers. Both phones send this data to their cloud server, the server is able to match the pair (unique timing of the bump, unique intensity, etc...), and then it transfers the contact data.
You're using a lot of imprecise terms. When I was a kid, I probably packed in those 5000 calories a day, but still stayed thin. I knew fat people who ate like tiny sparrows but stayed fat. There's a strong genetic (or bacterial, or whatever) component to weight.
There's nothing inherently 'demeaning' about the term 'lifestyle business' -- except that in the context of people who are seeking something more, it implies something less.

Picking a new name will shift the implication. See "euphemism treadmill":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#The_.22euphemism_trea...

Whatever new term is picked, no matter how initially flattering, will -- when repeatedly used in the same contexts -- eventually adopt the same connotations of 'not good enough for bigtime purposes'.
Each with their own types of vulnerabilities.

I wonder how many non-techies (the masses) have had their Outlooks ripped vs how many been ripped off by web 2.0 site participation?
Its still going to use the Linux kernel, and that makes it Linux I think, though we're messing with semantics.

Regardless, I agree with your view that the blowback is ridiculous. The more people that are using free software, the better for all of us. I think people are irrationally tied to the Microsoft brand and any comfortable step away from that is nothing but a good thing.

I am excited that a big-name like google is doing something like this. It means I likely have to worry less and less about good drivers for more hardware.
the video shows it takes about 15 seconds to launch the app, tap the button, and exchange data. now add in time to pull your phone out and unlock it (possibly with a pin). i just timed myself and it took 10 seconds to take the phone out of my pocket, slide the unlock bar, put in my pin, push the home button to get out of the last app i was in, and scroll to the home screen of apps.

so 25 seconds may not seem like a long time, but realistically, standing in front of someone for 25 seconds doing nothing is pretty awkward. really, try it. go up to someone and stand there counting to 25 in your head. now consider doing that in front of someone you don't really know (otherwise why would you be exchanging information?)

now consider pulling a business card out of that same pocket and handing it to the person. they can say thanks and put it in their pocket without even looking at it, then process it later.
Apple gets bashed for being too selective in approving apps.

Instances like this will raise the ante on the approval/rejection process. Pretty tough to vet the ethics of the company behind the app as a part of it, eh?
That's true, and an excellent point.

If you go back to the days when Palm Pilots were the rage, you could beam your business card over the IR port on them. People still used biz cards, but two people who had a Palm didn't.

I'm probably a bit bias as I live in a city (Boston) that's littered with iPhones. Lots of people have them, including my friends. There is a mini-technology gap between people who have them and those who don't. If you're in the "iPhone crowd" something like this seems really cool. Otherwise, meh.

If this suddenly worked on every cell phone in the world tomorrow, not just iPhone's, you'd probably have a lot more people interested in it.
Much of the land used to grow corn and soy should rightly be used to graze animals. It is only used to grow plants because of federal subsidies. Remove the subsidies and special water rights, and it would revert to grass lands best used for sheep and cattle.

I'd go google up the data about heart disease declining in Japan and continental Europe in the post-war era, but I get the impression you're blind to facts.
It actually reduced the border with Russia to zero.
Valid? This sounds like a bad immitation of linuxhater, at least linuxhater gets his facts right:

"Linux still doesn't run right." BS, his own blog runs on linux.

"Chrome is shit?" BS, Safari copied every single innovation of chrome.

"Nobody uses Chrome?" Lol, chrome is almost beating Safari already.

"Netbook sucks." Who cares, Chrome will start up on netbooks and go all the way up to desktops. They have to start somewhere and starting on a niche such as netbook is a good idea.

"Operatin system are hard to build." The GCOS is based on linux, 19 year old now, not to mention the gcc and glibc so almost 30 year old. And chrome already rocks.
Revenge of the Nerds: Four Reasons Why Women Dig Geeks
>" [deploying production code from local dev] always involves several steps like packaging up the source from you source code management system, putting the source in the correct place remotely, and the restating the remote web server. This can be very tedious by hand, especially for a couple of frequent, small changes. "

did i get this right? commit/push local code, up/fetch on server, reload web server.

am i deploing wrong or naively? you know some people honestly don't see the point in version control? yeah, i don't want to be that person.
I'd imagine they also do some geolocation, so it's two users who bumped at the same time and same place. Dunno how accurate a location they can get, but unless it's a really crowded mixer, this should probably enough to uniquely ID people. It also suggests some interesting features, eg. the software could record when & where you met somebody, and could suggest other people who were present at the time.
Sadly, Pandora Is Still Going Bankrupt
What are you thinking of as infrastructure? I suppose broadband is more widely available now (10 years ago I was on dialup at home, now my max is over 2MB/sec); PC hardware has become fast enough for Javascript/Flash/Java (and much improvement on their software implementation performance).

From the developer point of view, AJAX-style dynamic webapps have become easier, with browser-support, dev tools, and a trained workforce; ditto for the server (esp. ruby on rails, but it's across the language-board, and DB, OR mapping, XML, JSON); and cheaper servers (which are also much more powerful). OK, OK! You've convinced me.
I'd have the opposite take on the title "lifestyle business". The opposite is really the "get rich or die trying" business. The opposite are the businesses that can only survive as long as they keep coming out with some new novelty until they're bought without necessarily creating a sound business.

Lifestyle business means that you have your priorities right. The purpose of business and money is making life easier and nicer. Life's purpose isn't business and money. The problem is that we put people like Mark Cuban on a pedestal for creating something that couldn't make money and didn't create much value simply because someone else was stupid enough to pay billions for it in a frenzy. At the same time, we don't have a lot of respect for people like the restaurant owner who does a consistent good job because what he does can never have the "infini-scale" of large web projects and get bought for billions.

Of course, as we've seen, the "infini-scale" almost never happens. Really, what company that was purchased in all the .com land rushes has made the owner much money? Not broadcast.com, not YouTube, not Geocities, not AOL, not FeedBurner, not Jaiku, not Dodgeball. . . But all of them were acquired for tons of money. They played "get rich or die trying" and got rich while making nothing that lasts up to that measure.

Lifestyle businesses aren't about who works harder. It's about creating known value rather than the latest fad. It's about giving customers something good at a fair price rather than trying to corner the market, exercise the synergies, actualize the growth potential, or whatever other marketing speak one would use to get a large, scared player to buy you when you have no profit potential. Lifestyle businesses are about humbly giving people something good and knowing that you're making a positive impact on their lives. Maybe you aren't "game changing", but people appreciate a good business.
So I'm a Swedish PhD (who did actually do their pre-computerized tests 19 years ago), and I got a "below average" with I think 3 out of the 9. I would probably have gotten one or two more if I'd actually paid attention but since the load times were so long I sometimes missed the instructions (notably the colors where I also got 0/16).

The test I did 19 years ago also did have some of these "psychological" aspects to see how you reacted to impossible tasks, etc.