skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder if the issue of carriage has more to do with the Avg. age of founders being ~25yrs. vs. VC's ~45yrs. Beyond the obvious appearance issues you tend to develop more confidence, present better, etc. as you age. That said a fundamental difference in the Funder vs. Founder personality makes sense as well.
helps reassure some prospectives

In reality I don't think it works as you expect. Most people have come to see these "collective experience" lines as excuses for not having anyone on the team with more than a few years of experience.

Would YOU want to get a heart transplant from 5 medical students with "10 years of collective experience"? The reality is that this collective experience is not really additive. If you have 1 person with 20 years of experience in some area, they've seen a couple of cycles and progressions of technology. No amount of people with 3 years of recent experience can ever really match this.
This sounds like the best way to find the stereotypical sales person. The sales person who turns everything into a competition. A person who'll race you to the water fountain then brag about how much more they can drink than you.

Are those really the types of people I have to have in order to win? I know I'd want to kill them after a month of them being there. And, I bet my customers would feel the same way about them.
"I always worry the speakers will put us in an embarrassing position by contradicting what we tell the startups, but it happens surprisingly rarely."

Why would someone with a different opinion be embarrassing?
About page (easily findable by truncating the link above).

http://www.pawfal.org/fluxus/

This is the software used to create the video linked to in this HN thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=795184
A vacuum cleaner literally sucks. I'm not sure how a flash slide show literally sucks.
> The issue was one of regulator-shopping.

Which will always be a problem, so you've just told us one of the mechanisms for regulatory failure.

> You've got AIG

Bzzt - AIG was not just under OTS, they were also under insurance regulation and a couple of others. And they were regulated in several countries, often in multiple ways, not to mention states. And these agencies cooperated.

AIG was pretty much a best case for regulatory success.

And now it's a conduit for payoffs to Goldman Sachs. (Yes, I know the collateral story. I'm hoping that someone will post the details so I can show how it doesn't mean what they think it does. GS should have been left holding the collateral.)
I think that the Taliban know that blowing up girls' schools (and the girls) is wrong.

I would totally disagree with this. Unfortunately, I think that this assumption that those who are against us "really" believe as we do and are deliberately acting in a way they know is wrong is terribly corrosive to finding solutions; it implies both that we need not sincerely explain ourselves to "the bad guys", and simultaneously, that they can be convinced to stop doing bad things if we shine a light on the things they're doing, since it's assumed that they're really feeling guilty and don't believe the things they say.

You cannot shame a person into behaving properly if they believe they are already behaving properly.
But isn't all nonsense vanity in itself?
It's someone making an alternate grammar for the Python VM. There's no waste in a learning exercise, even though the (juvenile, topical) humor may have dated itself.

Note to self: in order to not piss off HN readers, make a tutorial/postmortem at the end of the project.
You could use it for an idea you want to A/B test.
I was recently looking back at the Startup School 08 videos, and the difference between the startup founders (even Bezos) and Greg McAdoo (of Sequoia) was striking.

I've since heard that Greg is one of the most "hacker-like" of VC's out there... which would go to further proving that point.
"How startups are allocated space" is answered every time by pg when people call YC an incubator.
And the perfect start-up founder is ....

http://croutonboy.typepad.com/photos/people_i_hate/scrappy.j...
But accomplishing nothing and taking pleasure in nothing for months or years is clearly destructive. I don't think the piece meant to suggest otherwise, but it came off seeming as if it did.

That's because years of raising public awareness of depression as a serious problem has led to people no longer labeling minor episodes "depression." It used to be common for someone to say, "I'm depressed," or "I'm feeling depressed," when they were, umm, down in the dumps. People have stopped saying that now that clinical depression has become the primary meaning of the word. A lot of public awareness work went into making people realize that major clinical depression is very, very different from just feeling sad. It was important for people to realize that. However, it doesn't mean there aren't illuminating connections between major clinical depression and just feeling down in the dumps for a while. Consider the difference between a burning house and a burning candle -- it's important for people to understand the difference, but they're both "fire." If we redefined the word "fire" to only mean life-threatening, out-of-control forms of fire, wouldn't that actually weaken our understanding of fire?

To support my point that the meaning of the word is changing, consider the difference between the dictionary definition: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/depression

and the way the word is defined at NIMH: http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/depression/compl...

There are a whole bunch of people jumping into this thread to make the point that using "depression" to refer to anything other than a mental illness is wrong. But that is a recent redefinition of the word justified by the laudable goal of helping people realize how serious depression can be. (Basically, it's PR elevated to PC by its good intentions.) That meaning has obviously served a valuable purpose. The question is, does the traditional definition of depression actually encode a better understanding than this new PR/PC definition? Maybe, as with "fire," it's best to distinguish different forms of depression by qualifiers and special terms rather than pretend they're entirely different and unrelated things.
those are some good points. Here are some examples that may or may not support this:

1 - We have a company formed in a Shanghai district. The company is categorized to be in the IT business. We have a favorable tax policy. Very favorable I'd say. Much better tax position than anything I've run in the U.S.

2 - We have an HK entity as well as our China entity. They actually are not legally connected except through individual owners/investors. For the most part, the HK entity gets used for money moving around outside China. The China entity gets used for all things within China. Oh yeah, we also have a U.S. LLC. Wouldn't want to dodge the U.S. for money moving around there.

I agree that if you get big, you need to spend some amount of energy ensuring you have local government patronage. But you have to be very large or very naive to run afoul of these problems. I know people that have run afoul. They were mostly being naive and not taking care of certain clear signs that could have helped. I lost millions my first couple years in Shanghai. But it wasn't because the government swooped in. It was because I could not collect from my business partners. They got paid, and when I tried to collect my share, they made excuses, dragged their feet, until I was too weak to be a big bother to them. This is very typical Chinese behavior and had nothing to do with the government. I was naive. I paid my dues and moved on.

Maybe Beijing is tougher, but Shanghai is pretty easy to run your company and handle employees correct. Sure, the rules "adjust" from time to time, but everyone is effected by rule changes so there are lots of examples for how to adjust. It does take an education and knowing whose advice to trust. I'm very fortunate that my wife is Chinese and has run several online media companies and was liaison to the gov years ago when they designed their Internet and telecom policies. So now, I do the tech work and she does the biz work and makes sure our contracts are written so we get paid and everything runs smooth. But you don't always have to marry into this. There are many solid local Chinese to partner with.
I can't answer for Kate, but the last speaker of the summer was a founder in his 40s -- and former VC at that -- and he still definitely gave off the founder vibe.

I think the biggest difference between younger and older founders seemed to be the relative levels of confidence at various points in the game.
Hmm, why do you this is showing off? Maybe her friends are interested in casually following her along on her travels?
I don't really read it for "news" though - it's more of a "hey someone wrote/created something cool" source for me, which is a-ok as a crowdsourced thing.
4. How scrappy founders are. That was her actual word. I agree with her, but till she mentioned this it never occurred to me how little this quality is appreciated in most of the rest of the world. It wouldn't be a compliment in most organizations to call someone scrappy.

Scrappy is getting by on the most minimal of necessities, does not ever involve a company doing one's laundry, and from everything I've been able to gather, requires actual bean counting.
Maybe I'm not up to date on trading fads, but as far as I'm aware, the "packaging and securitization of tuition" is an exception rather than the norm. At most, it creates a theoretical potential for a speculative market and thus a bubble.

But there's still a fundamental difference: a degree cannot be sold, and acquiring one is a multi-year undertaking, which puts a tight limit on the number of degrees on person can hold.

Even the securitized aspect of the housing bubble depended very much on the inflated resale price of the underlying asset to yield ROI fairy tales. With tuition, there is no resale price, and basing valuation on the cost would be absurd. The only sensible base is the income gap - and for that to be driven up by speculation would require a rather different world from ours, where companies buy and sell ivy leage graduates at inflated wages and with inflated severance payments to the previous employer.

Oh yes, there is a market that works like that. Only, it's not in college graduates but in professional soccer players.
2. How much startups' ideas change. As usual, by Demo Day about half the startups were doing something significantly different than they started with.

If this is really true (and I fully believe that it is), why not just interview individuals like a job interview rather than have them pitch ideas?

If you know the resulting product is almost certainly not going to look anything like what they're proposing, I would just try to swing some on-campus interviews at Stanford and UC Berkeley, hire the kids based on smarts & personality and then put them in a room and only then start talking about ideas.

Why bother reviewing their initial ideas at all (other than as an indicator of the aforementioned smarts & personality)?
I've heard many positive things about Archlinux and a friend of mine who used to run Slackware now runs Archlinux and he's very happy, as far as I know. I don't use Archlinux for two reasons: I already know Slackware, and I have also heard, first hand from him, that Archlinux tends to break a bit more than slackware-current, that is, it's a bit more unstable.

But, yes, Archlinux is definitely another distribution that could fit me too, as it's quite simple and doesn't get in the middle. I'll probably try it one day if I become tired of Slackware.
Find a way to make you $110, rinse, repeat!
Good question. I guess my simplest possible answer would be to never be on the critical path. In other words, no project I ever work on is waiting for me to do something. I get done what we've agreed upon as quickly as possible, ready for the next steps. Invariably, if you're any good at all, you will almost always be waiting on the customer for something. As long as you're in this position, you're in good enough shape that you should never be afraid to take on business.

I was addressing OP's irrational fear of doing something, which, in his case, is probably exactly that: irrational. Hope that answers your question.
Yes. Intentional or not, "Awesome Female Coder" kind of implies that female coders are not expected to be awesome, which, ironically, is probably exactly the opposite of what the OP is trying to communicate.
Weird, I asked and to my wife "scrappy" meant someone who gets into physical altercations. References were made to a family member who has a volatile personality.

To me, a "scrappy person" has always been someone who, when life or a situation knocks them down, they get back up and try again. I was not aware that this was a derogatory term.
Heh, when _I_ first started using the internet, domain names in the UK were "backwards". My first email address was:

rwj@uk.ac.dl.cxa

In fact the first "domain names" I used were things like "lancs.pdsoft" but I think those were X.25 names, and the less said about X.25 the better.

At some point around '91 or '92 JANET reversed all the domain names to bring it into line with IETF standards. This caused some confusion with names beginning "cs." which could either be the Computer Science dept of some UK unversity, or a domain in the old Czechoslovakia.
I removed it to quote only the bit I was referring to, since I didn't think a phrase that seemed equivalent to "medical problems aside, ..." would matter; I wasn't referring to anything I'd characterize as an "anxiety disorder", or, indeed, any kind of medical issue at all. I'm also not quite sure how my explanation came across to you as a signal that I was unwell. :)
>> it would encourage people to create accounts on my system for the sole purpose of gaining these badges.

I doubt anyone would make a (non-spam) system that rewards people just for signing up. The site creator would be careful to reward only meaningful actions. So this isn't realistic.

>> It further encourages behavior designed to obtain badges.

That's the whole point of the badge itself though - encourage a particular type of behavior. I don't see this as a problem either.

>> bill it as a more generic hub for sharing information about what users get done in a given application

Very interesting take on the idea.
Basecamp: A Clear and Present Brand
I am in no way trying to be disrespectful here, but if you rely on an online forum to keep you from going crazy, you might want to consider restructuring your priorities and workflow to give you a little more time to breathe and enjoy life. An online community is great and all, but there are millions of other, more tangible and real world, things that can be as, if not and most likely
more, rewarding than participating on HN.
The case against organic food does not stand up
While not entirely related to the article, I've been wanting to start playing with an Arduino for a while now. I have a little bit of experience with circuits, but not really anything that goes beyond soldering a longer wire onto something.

Does anyone have a suggestion about where to start with Arduinos? Specifically, a kit which would be complete enough to play with and make a few things.
Will Google Establish a Pattern of Cowardice?
Making money from programming language design
This looks like an excellent library, the demo works nicely on my iPhone, but...

I think that simulating native UI is a bad idea all around. If it looks like a native app, acts like a native app, I expect it to do everything like a native app. This gets 90% of the way there, but due to the nature of the browser will never be 100%. I think you are better off with a unique look and feel that won't confuse users. You'll also spend less time developing it, as you won't struggle to get every little detail to match.
there are millions of other, more tangible and real world, things that can be as, if not and most likely more, rewarding than participating on HN.

Well, that depends strongly on the person, doesn't it? :)
I've never been as lonely as when I started a one-founder company. Long hours practically made my social life go away. Sure, I hired people, but I couldn't afford to hire the people I really wanted to work with.

Lessons? Don't start alone. Pick your co-founders really well (think "marriage"). Make sure you have people you really want to work with who are ready to leave their jobs and work for less money because they really want to work with you.
Android Market Sales data: pitiful $64/day for a Top 5 app
Here's a counter point, though. For readability, you should make your text blocks around 33em wide, which is about 66 characters. If you lose the side bar, you have to choose between really long lines, which suck, or multiple columns which is a chore at best, and impossible at worst since columns only really work in the format of a "page," since the reader would potentially have to scroll down then scroll back up for the next column.

So my caveat is that if you lose the side bar, don't allow your text to expand willy nilly!
Worry not, it's just a small subset of people here. At least, I hope that most of HN sees the value in doing something just because you want to.
Bihar Public Service Commission
Bihar Public Service Commission or BPSC is the centre of the civil services for Bihar.
This is how: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/literally [see "Usage note"]
I have to admit that I like the idea that as an American I could walk up to President Obama, address him as "Mr. President", and then hold an intelligent conversation as fellow citizens. That's pretty cool.
> I wouldn't quite put it that way, because PEGs are defined abstractly, not in terms of any particular parsing method.

I thought one of the core things in PEGs was ordered choice, which implies execution order. Packrat parsing is just a space vs. speed tradeoff, converting super-linear time (thanks to backtracking) into linear time with linear space (thanks to memoization). Are there PEGs that have unordered choice? (lpeg doesn't)

> It gives you no help in understanding whether any of your language's productions are ambiguous to a user.

Point taken.
The average intelligence and professionalism demonstrated on this site is pretty darn high.
I must be missing something. Isn't that what `git log` is for? Or perhaps even, the Github interface itself? http://share.kyleneath.com/captures/Commit_History_for_kneat...

Would really like to hear a real use case for this. As far as I'm concerned, both Github and TimeCert are unreliable 3rd parties (not like we're talking a certified notary here), so using TimeCert to "prove" you did something is the same as using Github to "prove" you did it.
Not your fault.
I'm disappointed they didn't mention Larry Page's proposal for a monorail to connect Michigan's North and Central Campuses for the freshman intro to engineering class. It pops up as a joke at Michigan every so often, especially w.r.t. soliciting for donations from alumni. He briefly mentions it in this interview: http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/pag0int-3
Your question is wrong. Startups aren't allocated space, they are independent companies. On a modal day, I see 0 people from other startups.
Maybe, but interacting with people directly is more distracting than HN too.
I would think that posts regarding atypical activity would be the most interesting of posts. If a friend spends 90% of her time chained to a desk in a boring job, then I'd be much more intrigued to read about her trip to another country than to read about yet another day at the office.
That may have contributed. But its sort of like saying cigarette companies took a downturn when states made it harder to sell to minors. This is something they shouldn't have been doing in the first place.

Note: I'm not comparing being disturbed during dinner to having lung cancer.
The point of that comment was to what? Refute that there aren't other things more rewarding than HN and dependent on the type of person, having HN be the only thing keeping you from insanity is perfectly fine and healthy?

Apologies for sounding trollish, but I'm somewhat shocked at the reactions here. We have someone telling us that they work themselves into such a lonely place that the only thing keeping them sane is HN, and yet no one is suggesting he reorder his life and find a better balance so that he can find more enjoyment.
When you know nothing copy. Artist have been copying each other for centuries. The Roman's copied the Greeks, the French copied the Romans, etc. I think when you start out you have no choice but to copy. As you get better you can start to do things differently adding your own to it. Eventually you are the one innovating.

Remember copying alone never pays off, but it's a great way to learn quickly when you know nothing. Microsoft was the best at this back in the day. First version was always a copy of what existed out there. After that they got feedback and iterated on that design surpassing the incumbents. Eating your own dog food helps in this process. They did this over and over with lots of success.

As noted in these posts, copying you copy success and failure. It's your job to sort which is which for your customers/community. You have to know the point when copying won't help you, and innovation should take over.
An odd thing thing about this piece of advice is that it contradicts a lot of the previous advice which is 'don't hardcode stuff'
This pattern is questionable for another reason - basing the app's configuration on some other, largely unrelated configuration (in this case, that of the network) can lead to elusive and annoying bugs. Configuration problems are much easier to debug when an application is told what its configuration is rather than trying to magically divine it from its environment.
Strained by Twitter, NTT Expands Data Centers
I'm glad more and more people are realizing this. If you think about it for a short while, you can use the similarity between college and other bubbles to take advantage of the situation.
Having an idea gives you something to talk about. It grants candidates many opportunities to prove (or disprove) their ability to operate within a problem domain. If they just dropped the idea-specialized interviews, it would be paradoxically harder to find "stem cell" founders who can take on any task.
I have a biased opinion (I wrote the article), but I'm not sure that advice necessarily needs to be "fresh" in order to be useful/good.

I learn "new" things all the time that it seems others have known for a long time.
Most really creative work is. Writers proverbially are loners, so are artists who are actually producing rather than showing off. Even architecture is solo in the design phase, it's also iterative; you come up with ideas, show them to the client, get their feedback, go off revise your ideas, and around again and again until the client is satisfied enough to start building; then the new set of changes start when the client sees it being built and starts making more changes. That's why the architectural and landscape designer I used to work for ONLY worked cost plus.
Yeah, but a lot of companies seem like they're overcompensating to me. I mean, even if I met these people in person, I know they wouldn't sound as "forced-casual" as they do on their website.
And that would have wrapped DNS and HTTP together in a very uncomfortable way -- you'd have to make at least one extra DNS query for every HTTP request to disambiguate.

People would just end up using a different separator after the DNS part, and you'd be back where you started (just with big-endian domain names).
Thanks very much; please consider posting here when you're done.
DEBUG = socket.gethostname() == 'developmentcomp'