skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The end of the article is overdoing it:

> "Was it worth it? It comes down to deciding what horrifies you more: the possibility of waking up one day and realizing you never took a shot at your dream or the possibility of losing your house."

For him, it came down to that. Okay, granted. But this:

> "That’s what entrepreneurship is really about."

Is it? I'm starting a web-based service business, and my fixed costs are well under $100 per month ongoing, and under $500 to start up. I'm financing it by working 3 months per year doing blue-collar work, and spend 9 months per year doing volunteer work in the third world.

I'm right and the New York Times is wrong.

#
Borrowing money is usually the best option. That's the whole reason for having limited liability as it frees up entrepreneurs to take high risks for large rewards. Part of any entrepreneurs job is to assess risk and reward.
i don't think anyone will force them to if they say that their OS is a browser.
The way the Philadelphia startup community has rallied around Indy Hall, Philadelphia Startup Leaders, and DreamIt is extremely impressive and the nucleus of something bigger.
I don't feel like a petabyte is a lot of data anymore.

Sun's Thumper is a 4RU cabinet containing 48 disks. If you had a rack full (10 thumpers: 40 rack units) with 2TB disks, that is 1 raw/unformatted petabyte.
It's kinda a script kiddie site that definitely is not blackhat

edit: to clarify it may be used by security professionals but there is no doubt in my mind that it was indeed a script kiddie site especially considering the coverage it got in that community and the hate that incurred from the blackhat community
Google isn't solely about advertising. In Google's other Linux-based OS, they make money off their app store.
Some types of capital-intensive business models essentially require debt funding unless the founders are independently wealthy and/or are willing to trade equity for VC funding.

A classic example is starting/owning a restaurant or bakery.
Sahel Kazemi(picture) Killed by Steve McNair
Micropayments like the things coming to video games, where you pay $3, and you get access to a certain weapon or accessory.
My main issue with this solution is that it takes the decision out of the user's hands. Granted, in some cases it is potentially beneficial to unmask the password, but I would not want a site to assume that I'm okay with this approach. Imagine if you have to type in a password presenting in front of a crowd of 100 people. Do you feel secure with this solution?

Whatever solution you implement, it's important to give the user explicit control to override the mask.
This is really too bad. I always went to milw0rm first -- even before SANS, etc. simply because I preferred to see the exploits in code. It is one thing to hear how an exploit works, but by actually seeing the zero-days I think it makes you a better pen tester and allows you to absorb some of the style and analytic thought that went into discovering the vulnerability.

I assume someone will take up the slack though. milw0rm was great, but there really wasn't anything that special. If nothing else, we still have metasploit.
It's a zero-day exploit site. Whether or not it's used by script kiddies is irrelevant. It's very often used by security professionals as well.
GWT compiles Java to JavaScript, right? So compile the Swing calls into calls to equivalent JavaScript UI library calls. Barf if they try to do stuff you can't do in JavaScript (filesystem), as GWT surely has to do already. (disclaimer: never coded GWT in my life)
Likely the financial (and social family) cost of "gross negligence" litigation would well exceed any measurable benefit. If the owner has a strong case, a private settlement for 30-50% damages is the most likely outcome.

Even in the unlikely event the accounting firm broke/abused their fiduciary duties AND a circuit/general court tort verdict was in this owner's favor, it would take years for the funds to work their way through the system.
And if you do, do it under the corporation's name so you aren't personally liable for the debts if it fails.
They are also easier to set up and are more portable, since they have fewer external dependencies.

Sorry, but WTF?
This made my toe-nails curl up.

You can't get a much easier setup than "already installed". You can't get much more portable than bash. And you can't get much less dependencies than zero.

Seriously, sit down and write the equivalent shell-script to whatever fabric/capistrano recipe you're currently using. I'm quite sure you'll be a bit baffled about why you bothered with them in first place.

To me it seems like Fabric/Capistrano were invented by people, for people, who are afraid to learn the bash syntax. This is unjustified, bash syntax is ugly but trivial.
I've taken the online US Military test and got 99/100 percentile on the English/verbal section and 100/100 on the math/logic portion. Output: Primary assignment: intelligence operative/analyst Secondary assignment: Combat engineer. I've also been scouted by my home country's intelligence forces (which I rejected).

Things that bug me about this test:
Q 10 - not enough time to evaluate each group so you auto fail, but upon redoing it and only choosing one without checking every group out I'm told I failed because I didn't check out every group. Autofail, unless you have reflexes like a cat.

Q 8 I purposely got 2/3 both times I took the test. Once the test was over, I rated the first time as under average and the second time as over average. Both times I was told that I misjudged my abilities. Which is it?

Q 4 The first time I did this test I thought she asked to look at the tape, as in the background color, so I got 0 out of 16 which put me in the bottom 10 percent (I'm not alone!) The second time I did it I got 16 / 16 with little time elapsed and only received top 22 percent. Ya right. Something fishy is going on here.

Q 2 the physics were ridiculous (too much energy lost to wind resistance, not enough energy lost due to elastic deformation) and the aligning of the paddles was annoying.

Q 1 stupid question. "save two people, also here is some useless information" ... "HAHA, you only saved 2, you could have saved 4"

After redoing the test and getting every question except for the ball one, the telephone one, and the group one right I still get "below average" Hahahahaha. Right. I'd like to hire a Swedish PhD to sit down and do this test, he would get 1 or 2 out of 9 (the racial ethnicity question doesn't count). The accent of the woman giving the test is unbearable and the little clues like "Memorize" written on the wall are no help at all due to all the visual noise.
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.
Sweden unwittingly executed a great strategic manoeuvre by surrendering all of Finland to Russia in that last war of theirs. That reduced Sweden's land border with Russia to a fraction of what it used to be. Later Finland became independent, which eliminated Sweden's Russian exposure completely. It's easier to maintain peace when you don't share a border with a chronically unstable aggressive empire.
Bump Technologies (YC S09): The Quest To Destroy The Business Card
If chrome OS takes away another 1 or 2% of IE usage, that's a big enough of a win for google and everyone else
Interesting, I had seen OnLive (http://www.onlive.com/) but not this one (http://www.gaikai.com/).

So who copied who?
If your business ever goes beyond a one-man operation, as this guy's did, you will find it necessary to trust other people -- partners, employees, vendors, lawyers, and, yes, accountants. Whether that trust is well-placed or mis-placed can be a very fine line. You seem to have the same deep understanding of what went wrong as this guy's wife does from her armchair in the living room. After your as-yet-uncreated business survives for 20 years, provides a living for 40 employees, and becomes a leader in its space, feel free to come back here and educate all of us on the meaning of negligence and common sense.
Negligence is not always obvious.

Most entrepreneurs with a technical background should take a class or two in managerial accounting before they start. They should work hard at understanding it and developing financial models for their business. And they should pay as close attention to their business as they do their product.

Perusing HN you see how few articles there are about managing the receivables cash flow cycle, negotiating with vendors, forecasting financial performance and cash flow, dealing with the legal aspect, working with banks, documentation, managing salespeople or negotiating sales relationships, etc. But there are many companies with decent products that fail, and many are caused by one of those problems.
This book is available on Kindle, and I've already read the first two chapters. It's quite well done, and colloquially written.

I have a weak spot for invented languages, but I haven't heard of half of the ones mentioned so far. Fascinating subject.
It's going to be interesting to see how committed Google is to this project. Google seems like a company these days with more ambition than substance sometimes. They have some really good services but they also have a lot of services that have seen very few, if any, significant improvements lately. It does remind me a bit of Microsoft when they had to get their fingers into every category of software even if they weren't offering a particularly good product. It was more about being in that space than actually being the best at it. I hope Google is not trying to go this route because it almost always ends up in mediocrity.
Does Anyone Use Chrome?
haskell list comprehension

entropy x = - sum [p i * (log . p) i | i <- [1..x]]
Obviously a one person web based start up that doesn't pay wages is going to be a lot less risky than a 40 employee business that is buy supplies in advance for each job.
It's not weird--it's very useful for looking up Windows support info or IE dev documentation, e.g..
I can see that executing some commands over a set of hosts at the same time could be useful

for h in $hosts; do ssh $h "my command"; done

As for deploying from staging to production servers, it sounds more tidy to build proper packages to deploy in staging and test before deploying the same packages to production.

Amen.
What the heck does Mint need your email password for?
Am I the only one that's really confused by the beginning, where it's just an exclamation point in a triangle, and some dimly-lit wires/pipes? Previously, I got to where the triangle was replaced by a few numbers, but got stuck there. I refreshed, and am still not sure what's going on.
I question whether or not this is causality or correlation. It may just be that overweight females have a higher concentrtion of that oral bacteria; not that the oral bacteria in higher concentrations is -causing- obesity.
Perhaps more tragic is that in his industry he often get's a down payment of 30-50%, which is often enough to cover the costs of the equipment.

Scaling up to 40 people in the custom home installation market is very difficult. Cash flow is a big deal, and the number of rich people who won't pay you the final payment, often for reasons that are outside of your control, is staggering. (i.e. I paid you $100k and my satellite dish keeps going out on me) There's not much you can do about it when your customer has 5 lawyers on retainer.

You can make a lot more money with 2-4 talented people. This is an industry with 0% margin on flatpanel TV, 50% margin on wire and 70% margin on inwall speakers.
A Y Combinator for India might be something interesting.
Chrome OS is Worse, That's the Point
No.

By which I mean: this is much more likely to be effect than cause, e.g. overweight people might have more sugary diets, so sugar-loving bacteria would be favoured.
Innovation in the Construction Equipment Industry
Would any of you consider working on a new startup in the construction equipment industry? Obviously, I would provide the $15k+ in funding and you would have equal shareholder equity with me. Just Google "used construction equipment" and you will see what I talking about - poor sites, tough to find equipment, etc...

I am a Babson MBA student (ugh MBA's) but also a successful entrepreneur. I have started a company called "Dirt Jockey" www.dirtjockey.com : a slang term for a heavy equipment operator and a PlayStation video game with the same name.

I need at least 1-2 programmers to join the team - Let me know if you are interested...

FYI - We already have a marketing database of over 500,000 equipment buyers with email addresses.

Thanks
Matt
The ironic thing is that this may end up being a better advertisement than the others are making.
Behold.. What is a Browser? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ&feature=relat...

Most people don't have the slighest clue what a browser is, nevermind an opinion about them.
I beg all YC alumni to use Bump.

The last YC meet-up was great, but nobody had biz cards (I took pics with my iPhone instead).

Prolly one of the funnest/coolest useful apps I've seen come through YC. I'd love to see massive mainstream adoption.
Help me rename "Lifestyle Business"
Against all odds, Chrome is my primary browser also (Windows for both work and home). I'm addicted to the speed and stable memory footprint and I only use FF for Firebug. I tend to leave my systems up for days at a time and I would always end up having to close Firefox daily to gain back the memory it had swallowed.
I believe it is nearly impossible for a small business to borrow money without a personal guarantee or collateral.
Your redheads example is either terrible or disingenuous or you're just innumerate; you're comparing 10k traffic accidents / annum with redheads, of whom there's several millions.

If you're going to try and have an honest debate you ought to pick an example that's not so laughable on its face; it's too hard for me to "forget" the actual sizes of the groups in question even when I try to assume they're comparable.

I pretty much give up on you; the sequence here is:

- some dude points out "if you could show that forcibly staying within the speedlimit => many more lives saved due to fewer accidents than are lost due to inability to speed to the hospital, it might be justified to hard-code the speed limit"

- rather than debate on the actual merits of the specific point in question, you pop over to trying to argue that on general principles the road to hell is paved with utilitarianism

- to make your case you invent a contrived example that's so far off as to be close to intellectual dishonesty

- you give up on your example and revert to just saying what it was supposed to accomplish -- showing that acting on utilitarian-calculus 'lives vs. lives' has revolting implications for the individuals on the wrong side of a decision -- while missing the point: utilitarianism is a tool for choosing between shitty alternatives, and that going the other way (picking the other alternative) has revolting implications for the individuals on the wrong side, too...which is why this is hard

Generally the best you can do is pray you're never finding yourself in a position where any of your decisions will inevitably have shitty consequences for other people; part of the general cussedness of life is that you can really only escape such positions -- or at least your awareness of being within one -- by shirking responsibility, adopting willful blindness, limiting the scope of your options, or becoming a jerk.
I lost my iPhone, so I can't use this, so here's my question: if I bump phones with someone, does their information go into my Address Book?

You have to earn your way into my Address Book on my phone by getting drunk with me or being related by blood (seriously, no exceptions - same as with Facebook).

Business card hate is way overblown; there's a nice natural segregation and there's enough room to write notes for follow-ups. I mean, business cards are a solution to the problem of exchanging information amongst casual acquaintences; they're not a problem themselves. I think this is where "business card replacements" (and we've had them since the Palm Pilot days) fail.
"Borrowers were just as irresponsible as bankers"

The borrower never has been and never should be the party to determine if they can repay a loan or if the assets being leveraged will retain their value through the life of the loan. This is the job of the lender. Yes, it was "irresponsible" for people to borrow so much, but the burden goes to the lender...and the regulators that allowed the lenders to behave that way...and the people that voted for elected officials that enabled regulators to do what they did.

In short, if you make money so freely available, you can expect people to take it.
no its the I am too lazy to workout disease

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.

You won't get a sixpack, since that requires a proper diet, but you should still be in decent shape.
Creating mashups: 5 classic mistakes to avoid
What no ChrunchPad?
Because it's sometimes simpler not to, especially if you're planning to do more than just internal deployment.

You may end up dealing with multiple operating systems or package tools, for example, at which point Python's ubiquitous setup.py (and tools which work with it on every OS) look very attractive.

You may end up needing to install App A with Version 2.0 of Dependency B, and App C with Version 3.5, on the same server, at which point virtualenv starts looking really attractive.

These sorts of situations are extremely common in the real world, and "use the OS package tool" isn't a one-size-fits-all solution for them.
"if the BBC tied all its web apps to one of those third-party libraries and then that library suddenly announced they were dropping support for some minor browser or screen reader the BBC were mandated to deliver to?"

Do you really think that picking up support for an EOL browser would be more time/effort/expense than developing an entirely separate javascript framework? Even given that others using the framework would also be interested in maintaining support?
Good app, but I doubt it'll gain traction in the business world. The business cards are too ingrained into our society.

Its like the don't shake hands techcrunch post, I'm not going to stop shaking hands, just because techcrunch thinks its an outdated method of greeting people.
I'm not a "nurturer" by default and so, after "x" has occurred (with "x" being different for each medium) and I've found nothing of interest, I bail. Different personalities and that's okay :)
"A $50 piece of software is worth what you pay for it 10,000 times over if it even improves your win rate by 1% (and Poker Tracker most certainly does much more)."

hehe - there's a big "if" there: if you play enough and if you use the info. I bought PT 5-6 yrs ago and I don't play anymore. A 1% improvement over 400 hands won't make my $50 back at the low limits :)
The tipping point for green IT
What are PCI auditors?
In matlab:
-sum(p(x).*log(p(x)))

Both look much cleaner imo.
Why we need to chill about ChromeOS
A client application that runs on your own pc and a third party website are two different animals.
Well I hope that is obvious for any type of professional investment.

Although my account tells me you are never fully protected from personal liability by setting up a corporation. The court system always has some leeway.
How Nintendo Delights its Customers
I do real-world deployment of Python applications. I use two of these three tools daily, and will be using the third once it hits API stability.

I use them because -- even though they represent added dependencies -- they deal with tough problems in clean ways.

For example, every platform has its equivalent of DLL hell; in Python it's not unheard-of for Application A to need version 1.0 of some library, while Application B needs version 2.0, they both have to be on the same server and the two library versions are incompatible.

You can solve this by careful manual management of import paths, or you can use virtualenv, which does it for you and ensures complete isolation of each application's dependencies. I opt for virtualenv.

Add pip and you get a reproducible build process: create a virtualenv, and install whatever's needed to turn it into a working environment for your application. Then 'pip freeze' and you have a requirements file which can reproduce that environment for you on-demand (and which is also human-readable documentation of the needed software).

Fabric's in the middle of a big rewrite and so I'm not presently using it, but I will be once it's stable, because it adds the final piece of the puzzle: deployment to multiple servers, with support for multiple targets (e.g., I can differentiate "deploy this to the staging area" from "deploy this to the production environment").

Yes, there are tools on popular operating systems which can do these sorts of things, but you don't always have a homogeneous deployment target where you can rely on the same tool being available everywhere. These tools, on the other hand, are pure Python and so get to be cross-platform largely for free.
they don't, they do use your banking service passwords though.
I think the point was that author was able to create a syntax for summation that had approximately the same shape as the math notation.

I don't think I would argue that this is a very good example of macros (and yes, I wrote that before reading pg's comment ;), but solutions people have posted with other languages all have foreign symbols in them -- syntax for passing around blocks, or language-defined looping or list comprehension syntax, not ones they have chosen to suit their own needs. In this case, that's a virtue; you learn the language's syntax, and then you know how to recognize summation within any program in that language regardless of who wrote it, but in cases where the problem is more complicated and the native syntax for what you need to do more awkward, you really do want to create your own syntax.

Arguably that's a danger inherent in Lisp: it gives more opportunities to create needless new syntax, not just the kind of syntax that makes a program clearer and simpler.

If you wanted to extend destructuring in Python (that is, (a, b) = (1, 2)) to cover dictionaries, how would you do it? In a Lisp, it's done with macros. The core language usually doesn't start out with any destructuring at all. In Python, you can beg Guido and wait, or fork the project -- neither option is practical.
Finding a place to put your bike is typically not a problem. The problem I find is that I am often too sweaty, and or dirty once I arrive at my destination. This has always limited me to places where I can shower, or places I don't care if I am sweaty/dirty.
US based iphone developer = you'll be paying out of the ass for a simple app. Unless you are expecting your app to net you at least 6 figures, it's pretty much not worth it.

You should do a sponsorship instead. Throw up a figure, and let a developer who isn't an iphone developer do the job. The developer gets to learn a new language, while getting paid. And you don't end up spending a ton of money. Win/win for everyone
I put in my $0.02 with "Freestanding Business"