skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1. Figure out your risk profile--if you're young and won't need to use your savings for a while, you can take a lot more risks.

2. Your risk profile determines the ratio of stocks to bonds that you want to invest in. Stocks are higher risk, but they've historically given much higher returns than bonds. One bit of classic investment advice is "put {your age}% in bonds, everything else in stocks."

3. Buy index funds or ETFs. For longer term, ETFs are a better deal, and while supposedly less "convenient," it really isn't hard to open an account with an online broker and buy ETFs. You have a lot of options here, but the S&P500 is the standard. You could put some percentage into emerging markets, small-caps, etc. The nice thing about ETF's, or index funds for that matter, is that they're partially diversified by nature, so unless you really try you're not going to get a portfolio that's highly susceptible to one particular type of risk. Remember that every time you trade you're probably paying a brokerage fee, though--if you pay an $8 fee on a $1000 investment, that's almost 1% gone--a few months of expected returns!

4. Repeat as you save money.

5. Ignore all market advice, news that "X is a bubble," "Y is about to crash," "Z is about to take off," etc. People who are consistently right about this sort of thing are making billions in the stock market, not writing blog posts or newspaper columns. And even if they are working on Wall St, it's difficult to tell the difference between luck and acumen. If returns were purely random, with nothing called "skill," we'd be statistically quite likely to see someone like Warren Buffett--who has beaten the market consistently--just like we're statistically quite likely to see someone win the lottery. Buy and hold, only sell to spend. That's the only strategy you follow!

6. Exception to 5: if you like to gamble. :) There's nothing wrong with having a "fun" investment or two, as long as you know that they're a consumption good and don't really count on keeping them.
If you don't care about performance issues, go for PHP, with a nice framework, so you can get ready quickly. Else, go for node.js (I don't know Go, but it seems it has a pretty good performance too).
It's not just for iPad, any tablet, and not just new once. I brought my iPad 3 in yesterday and got the SIM card, and off I was. 10$ for the SIM and that's it! The guy in front of me had an old samsung tablet, same thing. You don't have to be a T-Mobile customer to get this. No credit checks or contract. They are counting on you running out of the 200mb some time and giving them money then. But other than that, it's free.
I don't think C is at fault here so much as the fact that register machines are our primary model of computation.

Smug Lisp Weenies will be just that though.
About $15 a month from a military reading list site (http://militaryprofessionalreadinglists.com). That's $14 affiliate, $1 from ads. It's on a $40/month Rackspace VPS, so it's halfway to covering its costs.
Summary: Php is a stable and reliable.

Nodejs: Is new and young.

Go: Same history as the one above.

Scalabilty is not something that you should worry about at this stage, if your app reach the scale that you expect it to get then refactor and do something about it. Scalability has nothing to do with the language, so use that "Devil you know", stop wasting time and move on.
I’m very aware there are, and we use one of them.

How is it harder (technically. I realise billing is more complex)? You have some software that provisions a VPS with the requested resource limits.
I think CONHOST/CSRSS is to blame for this not CMD.
I must be understanding what you're saying. I've taken thousands of cabs in NYC and only a hand full of times have I been required to tell them where I'm going before they've allowed me in the cab. Or perhaps it's a racial minority thing? I'm an upstanding looking white guy.
I'd highly advise against this and instead suggest going with GPGMail or similar. Considering the NSA's documented influence on security companies, an encryption product from a large corporation is quite possibly the worst choice you could make.
Rio Tinto Deploys Driverless Trucks
http://www.driverlesscarhq.com/rio-tinto-deploys-driverless-...
yet, it already exists.

http://www.mineweb.com/mineweb/content/en/mineweb-fast-news?...
Go with PHP and buy Steve Corona's book - https://www.scalingphpbook.com/.

Also, be sure to get up on the improvements that have been made with PHP 5, 5.3-5.4. It's come a long way in 6 years.

Good luck!
Mashauri - the space-age accelerator for all startups
Twitter poised to hit acquisition trail
If I was starting from scratch today I'd use Go. Go makes writing fast, scalable and reliable servers as easy as it is possible to make it. At least that is my experience.

I started out writing CGIs and servers in C many years ago and have experimented with Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, NodeJS and Go since then.

Go has a syntax that is instantly familiar and simple to master.
Go's concurrency paradigms are simple to understand and easy to use.
Go's compiler is fast and clear.
If a Go program compiles it nearly always runs.
Go's built-in library has most things you need to write HTTP-based servers.

If you use Go naively you will almost certainly be using Go correctly: your server will be fast and efficient. This is not the case with NodeJS. Writing fast, efficient NodeJS code is hard. Maintaining fast, efficient NodeJS code is even harder.

On the down side - while Go don't suffer from 'callback hell' but it does have a tendency towards 'cast soup' - this makes working with JSON a little trickier than it should.

Aside from the main programming language I would also look at:

* JSON API-first driven development

* Redis

* NodeJS's plethora of web-centric code management tools & compilers: SCSS, RequireJS, Grunt etc

* Single-page javascript App technology: Ember, Angular etc

* Docker.io

* SVG

* Camlistore

These (with Go) are the main technologies I'd use to build a large web infrastructure.
Android by default notifies apps

So does iOS.
Great question. Other folks have made good points about the value of sticking with what you know but on the other hand there are advantages of other platforms as well. Could the kind of blogging application you've got in mind be built around Ghost? [1] If so then node could make a lot of sense.

I weighed a similar choice this summer and my first thought was Go but a friend suggested I look at node.js, Closure or Scala as alternatives. I wound up choosing node.js for an initial version because of the vibrant ecosystem with some great building blocks, mostly MIT-licensed.

jon

[1] https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost
Sorry but you're incorrect. Your assumption of the complication being death is exaggerated, the surgery in question here is not that serious. Even if it were death someone would have to model the adverse effects of the increased waiting list. People waiting might result in an increase in mortality surpassing the doubled risk from surgeon error.

How do you quantify which surgeons are better? I'm not an expert but surely this study's methodology is not without it's own assumptions. Things like complication rate vary wildly with patient population and other factors. This isn't a telemarketing job where you quantify easily. Similarly how can you quantify who the best programmer is? What is the economic cost of quantifying who the best surgeon is? How expensive is it to apply this study to every surgery? We must ensure that the rankings system is valid before applying it to prevent perverse incentives such as only taking low risk cases. You don't want a USNews Week type system like you have for universities which has obvious flaws and biases.

You say waiting lists are dumb, but why? Are you 'killing people' by letting an inferior surgeon operate? Why is 'don't kill people' easy to understand and enforce? By not killing one to save ten are you not killing ten people? You're seeing this as black and white. This is not the case. Whether it is better to save one or ten I am not the person to judge, but you are oversimplifying this drastically.

The ethical question here is NOT sentencing someone to death like killing someone to harvest organs. It's more similar to doing nothing to save someone most likely to die in order to save ten, like how they do military triage.

Life is 'abstract and fuzzy'. This isn't an engineering challenge, as you say there are several things to consider. Stalin ignored the human aspect, is this right or wrong? How can you blindly answer this without supporting your conclusion. What seems humane isn't always the right answer to things. By your same argument are layoffs ever justified despite it being for the common good for the company and the remaining employees?
I'm going to go against the grain here and say ditch php and build it on node. There is no better way to update your skillset than by building your own product with a tool you've never used. If you're building a web app, you'll need to learn JavaScript regardless.

Worry about scaling problems when you hit them, not when you're picking a language. For comparison, I serve 100k users per day using rails/Postgres on a single $80/month linode server.
> The best thing we can hope for is that Google makes Android so anti-consumer, anti-developer and anti-hacker

Except Google is doing the exact opposite. The Nexus 5 is the best off-contract phone out there hands down AND comes with an unlockable bootloader.

Google made the N5 and other kitkat devices more secure out of the box with this change AND continues to let you go nuts with your own hardware, best of both worlds.
That’s the thing - they DO exist, its just that the “big” players don’t offer them.

I almost get why big companies (Rackspace, MT, etc) don’t offer it - if you can make a schmuck pay $X hundreds and hundreds of GB of disk he will never use, just because he needs 4GB of RAM or a lot of transfer, in theory you can over provision the hardware.

What I really don’t get though, is the technically savvy people that think they’re somehow getting a reasonable service?
I switched to T-Mobile with the iPhone 5S, and I couldn't be happier. My coverage in the city has gotten better, I'm saving $20+ a month, and the satisfaction of flipping the bird to AT&T is incomparable.

Their phone "contracts" are the same no-bullshit deals. You get $X off the phone initially, after which you pay back the debt at $20/month. If you quit at any time you simply pay the remaining balance.

Compare with AT&T where the early-termination fees are punitive and far in excess of the "loan" they gave you to begin with.
Except the power of going on strike has been completely disintegrated with an automated fleet of trucks sitting back ready to be deployed.

Disruption will come, and they won't be able to stop it.
The conclusion to draw from this is that you shouldn't draw conclusions on broadly general situations that you know nothing about, not that you should draw conclusions that are likely wrong anyway.

"MBAs are bad for startups" or "Dalton Caldwell is full of shit" or "All of parent poster's startups have failed; why should we listen to him?" are not useful conclusions. Exactly what actionable intelligence have you gained from them, other than the fact that you have gained no actionable intelligence? If you take "MBAs are bad for startups" at face value, all you do is disqualify a number of candidates who might otherwise be good. If you take "Dalton Caldwell is full of shit" at face value, all you do is disqualify a bunch of information that might come in handy at some point. If you take "All of parent poster's startups have failed" at face value, ditto.

Rather, the useful information is in the supporting details. You can take Dalton's statement that "MBAs think they are beautiful, unique snowflakes that must be better than their peers", and then when you're sitting across the interview table from an MBA, determine whether this MBA believes he's a beautiful, unique snowflake. You have a lot more information at that point, namely his answers to the interview questions, his past work experience, and just the general vibe in the room. Similarly, you can take the parent poster's assertion that he learned things with his MBA, but that doesn't take away from his basic technical skills, and factor that information into your evaluation. It's about having multiple perspectives available to you to decide a specific situation, not about drawing broad conclusions that are ultimately useless.
As with many things, we incentivize the wrong things. We pay for the headlines with clicks and eyeballs - we will get more headlines.
There is a way to partition a sphere into six subsets such that, using only isometries, you can build two spheres, identical to the first one, with those six subsets.
From Belgium: http://www.famest.com/
I love these posts. They are super inspirational. I'm a relatively new developer and have some saas ideas geared towards restaurants and bars. I'm hoping 18 years of domain knowledge and great customer service skills will trump any lack in developer skills that I have.

Congratulations to everyone that's found success doing this. And a huge go for it to those of you on the fence of writing your own product.
I remember some of the same overhyped news stories the science journalist who wrote the article submitted here remembers. I especially remember the breathless (and false) reports about a "gene for" this or that human behavioral trait. The science news cycle[1] frustrates journalists, because every new study with an incremental finding (which may not even be replicable) has to be hyped up by research organization press offices, in the interest of obtaining more funding.

The author's follow-up on a famous science story from early in his career is thought-provoking. Indeed, editors are more nervous about publishing stories, even very well reported stories, that question good news and expose hype or even fraud than editors are about publishing stories on the latest science hero.

On the whole, it's good news that more and more scientists and journalists are alert to the possibility that a preliminary research finding may be false and overhyped besides. Here on Hacker News, we can keep one another alert by remembering the signs to look for whenever we read a new research finding news story.[2]

Hacker News readers who want to learn more about how research articles become retracted may enjoy reading the group blog Retraction Watch[3] compiled by two veteran science journalists with lots of help from tipsters in the science community. I think I learned about Retraction Watch from someone else's comment here on HN.

[1] http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174

[2] http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

[3] http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/
Node.
Node node node node node.

Why node?

Node is a great framework for building web applications. It's got good support for scalable servers using Amazon Opsworks, nodejitsu, heroku, etc.

Javascript developers are easy to find, and even with no Node experience, any developer worth their salt can get up to speed pretty quickly.

Front-end and back-end can be written in the same language.

You can build rapidly and get to an MVP very quickly, at which point you can either switch to an enterprise language like Java (ugh) or Go, or whatever else to leverage performance, or scale your existing Node codebase using modules such as cluster, or by developing simple strategies on multiple servers.

I have built every kind of applicaton you can think of using Node, from desktop apps using node-webkit, to simple TCP video streaming servers using the built in networking and piping data directly into ffmpeg.

Testing and test driven development is natural in node, and you can write your server tests and browser tests in the same framework using mocha and phantomjs. I've even been building integration tests and automated UI tests using node, mocha and pahntomjs.

Our latest concurrent benchmarks for a load balanced group of t1 micros on a single mongodb instance get to at least 30k concurrent requests a second before you get a few timeouts, but that's just because i'm not too familiar with ops and haven't done any proper optimisation yet.

There is no right answer to this quest, but the above is my personal and professional opinion.
It doesn't protect against root exploits, but it protects against data dumping with physical access. Hence why unlocking the bootloader forces a data wipe. It does not hurt users at all if there's an unlock, which all of Google's devices have.
async/await is just a generator function that yields promises. It is implementable even in node.js if you enable --generators flag.
Do certain venture capitalist invest based on the school of founder?
Exactly. One of the main barriers to the adoption of driverless cars is going to be politics. Starting off by threatening a bunch of unionized jobs would be political suicide. I can see the political cartoons now: Terminators with glowing red eyes driving trucks, running down crowds of helpless union members.
> Von Newman

It's von Neumann. And it's pronounced more like Noy-Man.
Node doesn't suffer from callback hell if you're an adequate javascript developer. Named functions?

Or how about a class which you pass methods to your callback functions and bind them to the instance properly.

You never need to nest a callback if you know how to work with prototypical inheritance.
Subway Ent Maintenance Posters Based on ‘The Lord of the Rings’
Why are you still on GAE if it costs that much? I learned Django and migrated my projects off GAE a year ago. It was rather painless to learn the bits of Django needed to replace GAE, and looking back it was a great move.
> Compared to driverless cars, driverless trucking is technically way simpler. When going from one warehouse in a sparsely populated area to a another warehouse in a similarly sparsly populated area, there’s a lot less that can go wrong.

Not quite. Long haul trucking has far more things to go wrong than a short jaunt from two packed urban spots to another. A lot goes wrong on these trips. Flat tires, accidents, bad weather and - of course - other drivers.

Case in point: a long haul truck from Oakland to Chicago has to tackle Donner Pass, the Wasatch, Sherman hill (the Wyoming continental divide) and then finally gets a flat stretch across the Great Plains.

I would counter that the best start is short-haul intermodal: trucks that pick up a container and haul it to an intermodal rail yard, and so on. Those trucks have to deal with a short route and much fewer potential problems.
Why does it have to be a driverless car revolution? It seems more likely we'll get there incrementally, adding pieces of the experience one by one as safety features. Eventually, with all the safety features enabled, the car will be able to drive itself.
I'd strongly recommend using what you know best. If you're good at PHP, use that.

If, however, it's been a long 6 years and you're going to be pretty rusty at whatever you use, I'd recommend giving Node.js a shot. We've had really good luck with it and it has a fantastic community behind it.
The cheapest way with the least gotchas is index funds tracking broad market performance via ETFs. Dump money in regularly and forget about it

In any event, carefully monitor your expenses vs. ROI. Know how much transaction fees are, how much the fund takes, etc. In my reading, I found mutual funds to have many costs; this is why I went ETF.

(disclosure: I own only ETFs at this point)
$400/month from "Play Piano HD" iPad app: http://mobilesort.com/play_piano.html I've tried a few other apps, but they haven't done very well - this one is consistently in the top 100 iPad music category. I think having a very clear message and value proposition is important, especially for small apps (impulse buys).
Reach into your pocketbook, pull out that blank check, write in the figures and a signature, and send it in the mail. Most science research orgs are 501(c)3 organizations - for whatever that's worth - in any case they will be happy to take your money.
Yes. Your point is fair and true. But I think as people begin to realize their data usage is going up, they will reluctant to use data usage if they could just use wifi. But on the other hand, free 200MB is good enough for a lot of normal browsing.

My phone has 200MB data and I can barely use up every month even though I read HN like at least 2-3 times a week. And it's easier if I can use data plan on the go when wifi is not a option.

edit and I think it would be interesting to see study on how much mobile version benefits users over regular desktop version of an web app.
Building a startup is hard enough. Adding another rather large dimension of an unknown language/technology is increasing risks significantly. Untested/unfamiliar technology is one of the top 5 risks which cause software budget and time overruns (pick any book by Steve McConnel on software project management, he does a good summary of these risks).

If you think you have the time and resources, and more importantly, if an interesting technology is part of the reason why you wanted to do a startup; then take the numerous technical advice given by others here.
Fyrebox (http://www.fyrebox.co) makes $250/month, 5000 users, 1% conversion rate to paying customers that pay $5/month, launched in June
Does it not seem silly, then, to use a political apparatus to fund science?
Since 2010, I keep saying that Singapore (nation state, in this case) will be the first "city" (with at least one million people) to adopt driverless cars in a short span of time. I would even accept bets :)

Municipalities with a lot of freedom will follow suit. I don't know if american cities will have an easy time fighting with unions, conservatives, taxi drivers, real estate owners.

Why real estate owners? Because once transportation gets optimized, "hot" areas of the city will cool down in prices, compared to other parts of the city.
I would also suggest checking out the TwoScoops book, very well written best practices. Barring that, just using the template defined in the book to start new projects will get you on the right path to great project organization.

django-admin.py startproject --template=https://github.com/twoscoops/django-twoscoops-project/zipball/master --extension=py,rst,html PROJECT_NAME
Rio Tinto, you mean.
I interpreted the title as "French Startups to avoid."
One year is hardly progress unless it takes in to account people in monogamous relationships.
Just don't input Keystone Ice ;)
$1000 to $2000 per month (winter vs summer) from Buoy Explorer iPhone app [1][2]. I plan on releasing an update for iOS 7 in the near future.

The backstory on why and how I created it is available on my blog[3].

[1] http://buoyexplorer.com/

[2] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/buoy-explorer-noaa-marine/id...

[3] http://matthewmorey.com/buoy-explorer/
In brief:
- PHP => cheap developers
- Node.js => share code between client / server / meteor.js
- Go => multithread & performance
I wonder if some of the usability frustrations would be eased if people adopted the convention of having a secure-only email address, where the only email it accepts is encrypted email. It probably would be easy to set it to bounce/delete any non-encrypted email. Maybe only check it using a separate email client. Traffic would be low so searching wouldn't be such a hassle. Use your other email address for receiving insecure email (and tell everyone that by default, their email addresses are insecure).
Xcode WarningLights for Philips Hue
100k/day is far from 4k/hour
Play Fantasy Even If You Hate Football
Could fracking boom peter out faster than DOE expects
Neptune's Pride 2, an online strategy game is only doing $2500 a month. http://triton.ironhelmet.com

I'm looking for remote work if you're hiring.
10 political assumptions
The State of Our Solar Generation