skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(just my thoughts. sorry if they sound pushy.)

Take a 1 week vacation without your laptop or cell phone. Go backpacking or something. Lay on a beach. Sounds like you're wrapped up in a lot of different things. Cool off before making a decision.

SF would be great, especially for startups. You can drop in at a pub and chat with a dozen other entrepreneurs over a pint as often as you wish. But moving to SF isn't going to make you work less (or more). Thats something only you can control.

Ultimately, if a change will make you healthier and happier, it's a good one to make.

And one more thing-- One thing I noticed during the week we were there: I was able to get a whole lot done during the working day, and after that... I did not want to talk about or think about work.

Being around other startups is really validating. You probably felt satisfied with your work because you knew that others around you were up doing the same. There's something that just feels good about waking up early on a saturday morning and going to a coffee shop to hack on your laptop with a dozen other bootstrappers. Humans are communal.
Reading through your list of points, it sounds like you're trying to justify not just trying and seeing what's possible. There's no golden rule or answer to starting a business, but there are plenty of successful businesses that started as a small part-time endeavours.

As a start, 37signals did it with only 10 hours a week:

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1078-it-doesnt-have-to-be...
funny thing about the internet, virtually everyone mistakes discussion for argument. Very little of what I said was a statement of belief.

I should perhaps have said that I was simply looking for someone to explain the sides so I can make a better decision about how I view it rather than just taking the viewpoint of an article in slate as certainty
open level24.js, type the answer or go to that URL...

BTW, the level25 is a fake 404 page, read the stack trace...
Amen. I can't count the number of times I've solved a problem while walking somewhere or doing something completely unrelated to work.

There was an article about marketing on the front page of HN yesterday that said 'think smarter, not louder,' and I'd argue that working a 90 hour week for any reason is just thinking louder.
I took that to mean she was feeding pigs dumpster scraps. Not sure, though.
"Scientists argue that it would be difficult to genetically code for feeling empathy exclusively towards your own child and much easier to code for feeling empathy towards all children."

Aren't there several species that do in fact shun the offspring of other parents?
Oh, good point. I read Charlotte's web so long ago that I forgot to think of what pigs ate. Still, hopefully the slop she's making is from scraps that never made it to the dumpster, otherwise the same concern about contaminants applies.
〃
Some doubt might be cast on the general validity of the results by the following brief description of the experiment being reported here:

"In the study, 40 wallets were sent out in each photograph category as well as 40 containing a card suggesting that the owner had recently made a contribution to charity. A control batch contained no additional item.

All of the wallets were stuffed with the same set of everyday items, including raffle tickets, discount vouchers, and membership cards. None of them contained money, however."

(Added italics mine.)
All religious traditions take guidance from more than just holy books (many religions do not even have holy books), and the idea (or assumption) that laypeople can determine religious truth by reading the holy book themselves is pretty much restricted to Protestant Christianity.

The fact that Swoopo promotes itself as an auction/shopping site and lists "strategy" as part of the experience skates uncomfortably close to the "no fraud" clause listed in that link, although offering discounts to losing bidders would seem to give them a solid "it's only gambling if you choose to treat it that way" out.
If it's sold in boxes, it should work well on many machines, otherwise it's going to get bad publicity, but you're right that if it's bundled with machines, it only needs to worry about some hardware (though it still needs to worry about all peripherals).
I'm not sure that's true. I've read that heavy metals in motor oil are not absorbed into plants growing in contaminated soil.

Can you show otherwise?
Havana, Cuba is another successful example:
http://www.foodfirst.org/en/node/273
I dunno, Americans are always complaining that Wal-mart is too big, they even have a presence in the UK (here they are called Asda, and they do do deliveries).
Stealing Data Via Electrical Outlet
Exactly.

Maybe there are people working for them by placing bids until they win every item.

It would explain this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=700250

Even with the new option to buy the products at full price, it would still be a scam since they've acquired customers by cheating them into thinking they would have the possibility to buy at a discounted price.

Anyway, there's an issue with the transparency of their operations which is not required in an auction site like ebay since on ebay the winner of the auction must be real, in order to buy the item from the seller.
Working a job and doing a startup is unsustainable, no matter where you are. Work/life balance is the same problem no matter where you are.

Yeah the valley is different, and ideas get funded easier and even dumb ideas get funded. Funding != success, so don't delude yourself into thinking that just because you can go out there and get funded you magically succeed or don't have to worry about money anymore. Maybe you have a decent salary for 2-3 years and get to "live the dream" but if it doesn't work out then you're pretty much back where you started.

I went through the wringer at 25 and it was my wake up call, and I heeded it.

If you want a good lifestyle, then make that your #1 priority. Working 80 hours a week for a long time leads to only one eventuality that often includes burnout, sickness, divorce, and unhappiness.

I know it's a tough pill to swallow, but sometimes an idea just isn't achievable given current circumstances. Working alone on something that requires 2 man-years to even "test out" is gonna be painful.

You have to either agressively cut scope, or better yet find an early customer and have them fund your work. Work with nature, not against it.

As for moving and getting funded... just a few thoughts:

If you get funded, it's no longer your company. The constant pressure of progress from the guys with money pretty much guarantees stress, anxiety, and indentured servitude as you haul ass to try out your idea. Remember who the VC industry serves; investors and the VC firms. While you do get something out of it (money), they aren't there to serve you. They are there to make money.

That's why all of my startups since I went through the wringer have been bootstrapped. I (or a small group of partners) own 100%. We have control. Even if we're 1/5 as successful as if we raised VC, the end result is the same b/c we own it all. If we need to grow, then we can borrow cheap "cash-flow" money instead of expensive "can I try my idea" money.

Frankly I am waiting for my first big success before trying my "big ideas" that require more up-front money and risk. It just doesn't align with my lifestyle priorities to try such an idea from my current circumstances.

Now I am sure that there are examples of companies that have great relationships with VC's, but it's probably more rare than common.

In my current startup I do work a lot, but I see my wife and daughter, hang out with friends, I exercise reguarly, cook dinner 2x a week, work in the yard and generally enjoy life.

We are learning, growing, and succeeding. We're already a success in my mind, and isn't that what you're looking for?

Hope the rambling was helpful.
Missing feature: the ability, after training a symbol, to click a button whose meaning is "Whoops, I didn't mean to do that". (I gave it some training examples for a couple of arrow-type symbols. I forgot to click to switch from one sort of arrow to the other. It now has a left-pointing arrow as a training case for a right-pointing arrow symbol. Or maybe the other way around; I forget which.)

Of course that was an utterly boneheaded mistake. But most people -- even among the likely users of this thing -- are boneheaded occasionally.

(Looking at the source, it seems that un-training would be quite easy; the app is doing nearest-neighbour classification, and what it stores is just all the examples it's been given.)
Interesting thing to note: The average 'consumer unit' spends 4.8% of their income on gas/oil. So when the price of oil goes up about 20%, it requires roughly 1% more of their annual income... and yet people still claim that the price of gas is 'killing them'.
Could you get every branch of Mathematics to agree to that? I think not. I was actually coming at it from the 2nd part of Source 1 (I first thought about it during my Real Analysis class) "The limits are all different so clearly no single value of 0 ^ 0 can be defined as the limit for every case".
How URLs Work
Good stuff. Loved the nonsense english song especially. Being able to understand the words sure helps, even if half of the lyrics are nonsense.

One thing that strikes me is that your recording sound is very "live." You don't include any instruments other than your three and use minimal effects. Is this an intentional choice to stay true to the live show? Adding a few extras that don't fit into the live show might be really effective--especially dubbing in some vocal harmonies.

That said, I think you're doing great. Just bought the one song you have on itunes.
Any coincidence that this is a government publication and that it doesn't show taxes?
You could bootstrap it on the side for a while, making sure you have something out there, and test if it really is a good idea without having to give up financial security. Then maybe you could seek some funding, enough to allow you to minimize the risk.
Full sized imags: http://www.visualeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/wh...
It's not the 1% that's killing them - it's the fact that they're spending at their limit and they don't have that 1% available.

"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery." -- Charles Dickens, 'David Copperfield'
Thanks. I saw the link after posting and saw that the author had occasionally had some trouble in the last second (due to swoopo's handling of all the simultaneous bids it seems). I wonder how much this will skew any results. Also, there are 179 live auctions right now, but I figure tracking about 25% should be more than enough for statistical purposes.
Mistitled. BASIC has a huge family tree. This follows one branch.
I think that the different feelings toward different families are based on pheremones, not sight, so it wouldn't really come into play with just a photo.
Claiming that everyone participating in a capitalist economy does so at the expense of others is pretty disingenuous.

Perhaps not everyone, but it seems to me that a large portion of firms in a capitalist economy prey on some human weakness or another, to varying degrees.
In a free, ideal capitalist exchange, it is not a case of one party benefiting at the others expense. It can't be, by definition, because then the free agent that is losing would not enter into the exchange. It is an exchange that both people benefit from. This is examined in more detail in the first couple of chapters of http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Price_Theory/PThy_ToC... (a textbook, not a blog post), but the short version is that due to the fact that different entities have different valuations on different items, free trade results in scenarios where both parties pay X-personal-valuation and receive X+N-personal-valuation, resulting in a profit. (The big failure people have in grasping this is missing the facts that valuations are personal, and valuations != money. After that, this logic flows simply and inexorably.)

Obviously not all exchanges are free and ideal, but both the cases you cite (Starbucks and EA), it's pretty close. I'd say 100% in the Starbucks case (you can get coffee from lots of places) and a little less so in EA's case due to the fact they have an IP monopoly on EA games (you can not obtain a Madden game from a non-EA source), but still, nobody's forcing you to buy Madden games either.

Swoopo is not like that. It is not a mutually-beneficial exchange between two parties; one party wins and numerous parties lose, with only one other party winning in theory (the auction "winner") and that still only at the discretion of Swoopo (if the "winner" is a plant, how would you tell?). Because the losing party entered into it freely and with reasonable knowledge of what is going on, I do not favor forcibly shutting it down either, as I can not imagine what such a law would look like anyhow. But we can still call a spade a spade; this is not like a free market exchange. This is a con game.

(The other possible out is that the auction losers are paying for an intangible feeling of fun or something, which is a valid thing to do if you choose not to judge people's value functions, but I suspect that a fair analysis would show that they are not really winning on this front either. Part of that analysis would be to show that Swoopo is the best way to obtain that feeling and I have to imagine a conventional casino is a better choice there for most people.)
Interesting that they chose not to consider taxes an expense, even though many things around taxes are decision-based (such as whether to defer income, what types of investments to make, etc)

If they had shown taxes, by my calculations it would be the second biggest expenditure, just after housing.
try Derek Sivers' http://sivers.org/muckwork and to push your music extra-fast to iTunes for FREE, try WaTunes (disclaimer, used to be their evangelist), for physical distro - go cdbaby.com
It would appear as though you have spent a good deal of time thinking about this. The irony is that even if 20 people posted their part time success stories, it would have no bearing on your success. It might give you a bit of confidence to go forward with it, but even that would be 'false'. If people instead post 20 part time failure stories that might make you hesitant, and that too would be 'false' as you might be walking away from a great experience.

Your trying to escape from a 9-5 job. You could do this by starting a company with a focus on making enough money part time (even freelancing) to quit, but you'd be surprised how quickly this too becomes a 'job' if you don't have a passion for it.

Your best option is to ignore most people's advice and build something you are passionate about with whatever free time you have available. Keep it as 'hobby' or 'lifestyle' as you can since that's what your seeking. If it becomes something you win. If it doesn't, you'd be surprised how many doors making something 'from scratch' opens. You still win.

Wondering if you can or should do it? That will take forever.
short story: no, but the tendency is for part-time startups to become full-time startups as the success level rises.
Yes it does. `Income before taxes: $63,091', `AVERAGE ANNUAL EXPENDITURES: $49,638'.

Computes to $13.453 paid in taxes. That's about 21% of gross income, and compares to expenditures as about 27%. It is my understanding taxes aren't considered expenditures or `costs' anyway.

The ring breaks down the expenditures, not the gross income. Whether this is fair or not is up to a democratic debate ;)
my suggestion - put together a new band - to be your project band - so that you can do what you want - plus, it gets you out of the rut of playing the same stuff again and again :)
And what is the effect on filtered water of water contaminated with various substances?
While electronic microscopes are still costly, you can build a scanning-tunneling microscope using nothing but a couple dollars' worth of parts from Radioshack and Wal-Mart. A student at my old high school a few years ago made one for a science fair project; it only created a one-dimensional image (he didn't have time to extend it to full 2D) but it worked.

How it works: a piezoelectric material, such as that found in speakers, can be manipulated precisely enough to move the head of a scanning tunneling microscope. The "head" of the microscope can be made by using a pair of extremely bad Wal-Mart scissors and cutting a piece of wire; this will usually create a very rough cut with a tiny slice of wire that extends beyond the cut, ending at atom thickness.

This wire can then be strapped to the piezoelectric material, and now all you need are some basic electronics to power and run the thing. Of course, this part is a lot of work, but it doesn't require any fancy expensive hardware.
The "nonsense song" was recorded by ourselves during a rehearsal so it's pretty much just the three of us. On our first album, there are many more additional instruments, background vocals, and overdubs. That was when we were with SonyBMG. Our producers wanted to get that commercial radio sound (which didn't help much in retrospect, it was still too rough for German radio - go figure).

Our fans often say it's too much and they'd rather like the raw sound of our live concerts. I think the next album will be a lot more like that. (Still more than just three tracks, though.)
If the price of gas/oil goes up, the price of other goods goes up as well. But that's probably not what they're complaining about ;)
Very nicely written.

Shedding distractions should become a new "term of art" for all of us.
Demonstration of remote keyboard sniffing using an antenna: http://www.vimeo.com/2007855?pg=embed&sec=2007855
great idea! :) you want to spin this off to a new startup? :)
$457/yr for liquor seems pretty small for a family with 2 adults.

And why is tobacco counted for the "average" person? I'd think the average person wouldn't be a smoker.
I met very few people who complain that the price of gas is 'killing them'. What you hear is the voice of a minority who either spend much more on gas or just like to complain about it.

Edit: why the downvote? Doesn't it make sense that those who are vocal about how gas prices are killing them are those who spend _way more_ than the 'average consumer unit'?

If gas represents 20% of your income instead of 5%, you are much more likely to complain when prices go up. This will be the case for people who make less than average, have long commutes and older cars.
* it seems to me that a large portion of firms in a capitalist economy prey on some human weakness or another, to varying degrees.*

Wow.

I take it you have a really, really broad definition of "human weakness" for this belief system to continue working for you.

Car broken and I can fix it for 20 bucks? You have a weakness for not knowing how to do auto repair. Need a good resume and come to my resume service? You have an inability to write and a lack of work, due to a weakness of the system. Need a program to balance your checkbook? You obviously have a problem with math, could be lazy in your account habits, etc.

This kind of definition will work anywhere -- suggesting that perhaps a new one would be better.
GNU screen with your vim session, split shell and send commands to the shell
Wow US tax rates are low (compared to Australia at least).
In the card game, the rule is that if a card has a vowel on one side, it must have an even number on the other side. Replace "the card has a vowel on one side" with "a person is drinking alcohol" and "it must have an even number on the other side" with "he or she must be over eighteen". Since a card with a vowel must have an even number on it, if a card has an odd number, one must check whether the other side has a vowel to know whether the card follows the rule. Similarly, if a person is under eighteen, one must check whether they are drinking alcohol to know whether they are following the rules.

If we refer to either "a card has a vowel" or "a person is drinking alcohol" as P and either "a card has an even number" or "a person is over eighteen" as Q, we can describe the four cards/people in both situations as:

1. P
2. ¬P
3. Q
4. ¬Q

The rule can be described as P implies Q.
P implies Q is equivalent to "Q or ¬P".
Therefore, in cases 2 and 3, P implies Q is known to be true without needing to know the value of the other proposition. In the remaining cases, you don't have enough information to know whether P implies Q. In case 1, P implies Q if and only if the value of Q is true when one checks it. In case 4, P implies Q is true if and only if the value of P is false when one checks it.
I have been working full time and working on my startup for over a year now. I think the most important thing for you to consider is the concept of diminishing returns. How productive are you in hours 0-70 vs hours 70-90? I spent a lot of my time living inefficiently and churning rather than optimising my lifestyle. Do you really need to do all that consulting or can you reduce your expenses and work less? I also believe that productivity is a function of our emotional, intellectual and physical selves. Being physically exhausted and emotionally stressed will not let your intellectual self work as effectively. I think about it as a marathon, not a sprint. I work 10 hour days, every single day. I exercise, every single day. My schedule is relative, where 0:00 is wakeup time :

0:00 - Wake, breakfast, email, news, exercise, transport to work if necessary.
1:30 - Work shift 1 (4 hrs)
5:30 - Lunch Break
6:30 - Work Shift 2 (4 hrs)
10:30 - Dinner Break
11:30 - Work Shift 3 (2 hrs) Usually meta, planning work.

When things are extremely busy, I will do a final shift of 2 hours instead of 4 hours. I think writing software, particularly as the principle of a startup, is a creative effort and my observation on writing code is that it is about avoiding errors, not churning code. I am a bit disturbed by your tone throughout this post. I suggest you take 4 days off to rest, relax with your wife and plan out a meal, exercise and work plan that will lead to maximum productivity. Remember, you are a human being not a software writing robot! You need balance in your life or there's no point in living it and I think once you are balanced, you will find you are actually more productive, even if you work less hours. Writing software is not like building tables, you know? You need insight, not throughput. For me, coding is 90% contemplating 10% coding the final solution.
This varies heavily by location. Several percentage points or more.

It would be a lot more in, say, New York or San Francisco, whereas it'd be a lot less in, say Tampa or Austin.
I don't think humans are so weak that they can't handle 60 hour weeks, but 90 is definitely too much. I agree very strongly with the overall idea of your post, but for me it is all about building the right kind of balance in my life so that I can have maximum productivity. For me, that is 70 hour weeks as a single fellow with a highly optimized life (premade meals, standardised routine etc)
Because he is "obviously old" he does not need to be checked by the bouncer to ensure he satisfies the rule "people under 18 cannot drink".
Hollywood-Style Lectures
Nice work!

I don't remember which CL/Google Maps scraper I was looking at earlier in the week, but this is far better, and quite a few popular ones don't seem to scrape Rochester.

Since I'm currently scoping out a new place, this'll come in real handy.
it depends on your startup type.

If your startup suffers the chicken and egg problem, you can easily do it part time, because it'll be next to impossible to gain users. So you can have it on the side, until you grow the userbase to be able to monetize it.

However if you are doing something involved with direct sales, every hour you spend on the startup = # of new sales = $$$$$