skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You should attend just to come see Adam Smith (Xobni) and Drew Houston (DropBox).

It's going to be an instructive day (and my time is limited to 20 minutes, so I won't be able to do much harm).
"I'll stand up and say I'd happily take a $40m pay out so that I could be completely financially secure and get to do what I want."

I agree. Just because you cash out doesn't mean you have to retire.
US trade partners: Where the surpluses and deficits exist
Great Serverfault.com question related to this:
http://serverfault.com/questions/45734/the-coolest-server-na...

My favorite answer: http://serverfault.com/questions/45734/the-coolest-server-na...
Perils of improper outsourcing ?
Couldnt agree more.

We all find meaning in our work - entrepreneurs almost doubly so - and that 'meaning' is one of the biggest components of our individual happiness. When you 'exit' your startup you also exit that 'meaning' - and then there is no choice rather than to go back find it all over again.
While in the literal sense, you get opportunity from others, I think people get stuck in a mode of thinking that they need to get lots of money to pursue some vision or objective that they want. It becomes a mental barrier where they say, "I can't do this because I don't have a million dollars" Where in truth, there's more than one way to skin a cat.

Just because something takes a million dollars to do, doesn't mean that it has to be your million dollars.

I think Jason Fried's just saying "Be relentlessly resourceful" in a different way. You don't need anything like lack of personal money to stop you from doing what you want to do.

It's odd to me how many on HN readily accepted pg's "Be relentlessly resourceful" idea, but when it comes to the idea in a different form, how many rally against it.

"Be relentlessly resourceful" applies to things beyond startups, from paying your kids' tuitions, getting to drink mojitos on an island, and pursuing your economically unviable project.
Enhancing User Interaction With First Person User Interface
I know MBA's aren't the most popular people around these parts, but they do get Net Present Value. Basically, you need to discount the value of future earnings relative to current cash flow.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_present_value
They aren't a criticism of Tao. It was a tangent. I'm saying that intelligence that can only be applied to a few esoteric fields is overrated. I thought a thread about child prodigies would be a good opportunity to make that comment.
A friend of mine has a small business and he gave his machines the names of drinks and put the respective bottle on top of each machine: whisky, vodka, rum, etc.
I always thought "mojito island" was a metaphor. It represents the freedom to do what you want, where you want, and when you want.

That freedom often times is the same place you just came from, which shouldn't be that surprising. The term "serial entrepreneur" exists because there are enough of them. The thing that drove them the first time isn't likely to go away. Although I'd imagine most of the end up with a better work/life balance than they did during their first successful endeavor.
All web companies are user interface companies
Yes, that was my point. Were you intending to respond to noonespecial?
I get that...what irritates me is they don't do the same with Safari. With this logic, one could complain that the alphabet isn't kid safe because you can make naughty words out of it, or that a clock app promotes pot use because it reads 4:20 twice a day. A 17+ rating applied on such general grounds really creates a false impression about the products it's applied to, suggesting they are somehow more likely to expose the user to objectionable content and thus hurting sales.
Unfortunately that was not the case. She just had to rely on the smarter students to help her. Then they hired us (woohoo 4.15/hr) to come tutor the algebra class after school three times a week while we were in high school. Almost every algebra student came to the tutoring session most of the time. The teacher never showed up once.
In whose sense of the word is a plumber or a gas station a startup?

I'm not putting people who start those types of businesses down. Please don't try to make it sound as if I am.
Perils of believing there is a large market where there isn't one?

I love the Apple rumors also. "As reported somewhere else, someone said on his blog he believes Apple is 'definitely' working on a tablet." Oh well, that proves it then.
That's not the point. I am not talking about lack of originality. I am talking about failure to notice duplication in short list of supposedly interesting content published by oneself.
Tool of the Day: ThyNews: RSS Made Easy
This is one of those issues where I have an opinion but I honestly don't care that much either way. If the place I worked had one method in place I'd probably do that.

The nice thing about doing it on upload is It allows you to offload the processing to a job queue so you don't take a huge performance hit. (This is what I've done in the past). If you're resizing to sizes not relative to the original it also gives you the ability to maybe do some editing/cropping to make sure the resized images still make sense. Digg has a tool like this for avatar images.
FCC chief proposes new Net Neutrality rules
Anyone got a Scribd mirror of the PDF?
It's also on Columbus Day, so if you're off, you should go. I'll be up in the NE, so I'd love to swing by and hear Adam and Drew, and also share our experiences at JamLegend.
By the time I went to reply you took out my favorite quip of what you wrote—"That's the kind of line a politician would say."

The article was about entrepreneurs. It was not about your idea of startups. Your comment was defending a concept not present in the article.

I've never liked the word "startup". Ontologically it means that something's begun. I don't feel comfortable assigning more meaning to the word than that, though the connotations have been assigned.
past couple years? it's just opening now. has it been around that long?
maybe you mean wean hall, the old CS building, which won an architectural award back in the day, but to me is an ugly bomb shelter
Compensation Thresholds
How Micropayments Could Save Journalism
They were talking about $300k from a two-income household. Not that it makes you middle class, but that $100k-$150k bracket is fairly large.
Any news surrounding the CrunchPad has to be taken as seriously as everything else from Arrington's mouth, which is to say not very.

I'm surprised it has made it this far, but I doubt we'll see an actual product in the near future, otherwise Arrington's hype machine would be in overdrive.
I think a more scientific approach is of little help here. The issue is too emotionally charged. Most people have pre-conceived notions about where the problem lies, and they will go to great lengths to cherry pick their evidence.

Ogbu's research is useful today simply because political correctness has reached a point where we can't even consider the role minorities play in their own academic achievement. 50 years ago the opposite was true; the political mainstream was looking for anything they could to justify the status quo.

The bottom line is that if you are trying to explain some phenomenon, you won't reach very good conclusions by taking certain aspects off the table for political reasons.
The author didn't, as far as I understand, make the code reentrant. The code still operates on mutable state outside of the scope of the call such that two calls that pass in the same inputs may produce different results. The author simply refactored global variables into instance variables of a class, allowing him to create multiple instances of his original program's state.

Interesting to read nonetheless.
definitely going
"Amazon’s profit and margins have always been slender; it earned only $645 million in 2008, up 36 percent from the year before, compared with Wal-Mart’s $13.4 billion, up 5 percent. But Wall Street is more enamored by the promise of the online retailer, valuing Amazon at around 60 times earnings and Wal-Mart at 15 times earnings."

... and that's what you get as a tech company where people believe in the promise of innovation.
IIRC it was very clear: once you submitted the public test set and obtained a score that broke the 10% barrier there was a 30 day wait period for final submisions.

Then the ones over 10% were run against the final test set and the best winner determined from that.

Obviously releasing specific details about the final test set doesn't work because teams can fit to that :)
Yub, took that course :)

MBA or not, NPV (and the derived methods) are incredible useful tools in financial planning and decision-making for any business.
In this case, I suspect that downvoting means that people think you're being snarky about something that is blatantly awesome. Dunno though, as I wasn't one of them.
Ill be shocked if their not.

It seems a natural progression from the Iphone, e-book readers with internet connections proved somewhat popular and they have a market ready lined up.
Tweetdeck also filters Facebook, and others soon too, I'd bet. Given enough time, it would work with your email / chats / voicemail / smoke signals etc.

Filtering information is not a new idea at all.
Yeah, it's pretty crazy when you log into the dev account, but if I had thousands of people all CCing me at once, my email account would be just as, if not more, confusing. I suspect it will be a lot easier to get a hold of once they open up "real" accounts and I can just participate in waves with people I know.
One thing I'm surprised about (or maybe annoyed actually) is how, with time, the rumored Apple tablet has become something certain to compare other products to. Even though nobody has ever seen one.
The case for making computers more difficult to use in certain contexts.
Internet browsing for example can be an enormous waste of time.

Intentionally making Internet browsing more difficult can boost productivity.

For example, you could force the user to use a small window and type via an onscreen keyboard.
Moreover you could intentionally slow down the Internet connection.

As another example, one could force the user to close all apps before starting a game.
Hacking NetFlix : Netflix Announces Second $1 Million Netflix Prize Contest
I'm not saying there is _no_ genetic component - I would be surprised if it wasn't. Just that compared to culture it's not important. I didn't read The Bell Curve, but as far as I know (and refreshed with a bit of googling) it states that IQ is partly hereditary - I don't think anybody doubts this - and makes it easy to go further and say some groups of people are smarter. This is most likely true, but still not so important.

I just finished reading What Intelligence Tests Miss, by Keith Stanovich. Summary: critical reasoning skills are much much better predictor of academic and social success then IQ, and (that's the shocker) largely _not_ correlated with IQ. And this is just one of the factors which influence success. Even if a group is a few IQ points above or below average, the final effect is very unlikely to affect anything.

edit: Oh, and yes, critical reasoning skills, even if they're not as well studied as IQ is (which is a shame, but it's being corrected) have a much much smaller genetic component and are easier to change during lifetime.
Or maybe MIT students don't want to work at Google.
Android intelligent home screen proposal
The Handwriting of Liars
Are people sure that the principals at 37s haven't just taken $40M out of earnings? Selling your company isn't the only way to get paid.
Wait? age/gender/zip code - as in together for each renter?

That's not very anonymous.
I completely agree. FU money means that you have the freedom to work on what you want to work on. You can start any venture you want, launch whatever idea you want, and are free to take risks.

FU money simply means you have a guaranteed salary, no matter what. It has nothing to do with retiring. And I think it's a completely valid dream to have.
Softpanorama - Open Source Software Educational Society
iPhone in-app purchases not so hot for some developers
That's not what they're saying, though, at least not since they started posting these essays after the Mint sale. They've been talking as though taking a giant payday is somehow morally wrong, that it's backing down and giving up some kind of good fight. That's a much stronger stance than "Don't wait for a rich man to come along and give you permission to chase your dreams, just chase them anyways." - it's actually editorializing on what the content of those dreams should be.
Was this supposed to be a secret? I had heard something that we're losing intelligence cred because we can't keep secrets (wrt the CIA torture)
Does 37signals even make $40M in revenue?
Can you point to a better resource or study?
That was a pretty pointless article.
Contrary to some people here, I don't think DHH is arguing that taking a 40m pay ouy is a bad thing by itself. He argues that it shouldn't be your primary goal.
Another nice collection:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9220o/ask_progg...
A Paradox of Entrepreneurship
The only thing I'm really upset about here is the lack of communication. A new product type made by a new company is going to be delayed. Especially when you're dealing with hardware. It would be unreasonable not to expect a delay or two.

But you shouldn't just disappear. Everything that was posted on TechCrunch about this product seemed to be aimed at one goal: to get people invested in the idea. Now that they've done that it's really bad form to just let several deadlines pass with not even a word as to why nothing's happened.

I'm not saying reveal specs or anything but just a simple tweet would do. "Hey, we've run into delays on the Crunchpad, expect announcement in November" (or whatever)
The only thing certain about the rumored Apple Tablet, is that putting those two words in your article dramatically increases your hits.

Certain publications can't resist that temptation.
11. Entrepreneurship doesn’t always run in the family. More than half (51.9 percent) of respondents were the first in their families to launch a business.

This may be partly due to the fact that if your parents own a business, you're much more likely to work for them or inherit the business (than if they don't). Your parents or some other family member owning a company just gives you an extra option that might make starting your own business seem less attractive.
FCC Chairman wants network neutrality, wired and wireless
I wish the poster all the best, I just thought it was amusing.
Based just on your profile on there, I don't get it. First of all, the profile is hard for me to visually parse. I don't know what's important aside from the big image in the center.

Second and more importantly, there is little on this profile that I couldn't find in a phone book or a phone book website, both of which I consider almost completely useless. If I want your phone number, address, email address, or URL, I already know where to find it: Google. What I want to know is who you are, what you've done, what you can do, and why I would want to pick you among my other options. Basically, what's on your website. Your website is useful to me. Your profile here is not.
Mentoring in Open Source Communities: What Works? What Doesn't?
Race is a social construct. You are what people say you are.
Footjoy Golf Shoes
Footwear is an essential accessory which aids hassle-free and convenient game play. In the sport of golf, it has been deemed crucial in choosing the correct shoes.
“So after a much-needed vacation, the retirement is canceled and they’re back to start a new company. (Not always with as much passion as the first time around, but that’s another story).”

But sometimes with twice the passion as the first time around. You should only "rush to get out" if you've got something that you're really passionate about to look forward to. I don't know virtually ANY entrepreneurs who envision a life of pure leisure if/when they cash out. I personally have 2 or 3 companies/non-profits I'd LOVE to start and there are probably a few (generally young) that I'd even take a job at, assuming that I'd have enough autonomy to do cool stuff.
That's definitely possible, GC takes up a lot of time (and stops execution). I haven't done any formal benchmarking, but everything seems to point to the missing JIT compilation at the moment. I'll do some more testing.
Citing sports stars who came back from retirement in the context of this argument is idiotic. In most professional sports, there is a point at which your abilities start to decline due to age. The tension is between going out at the absolute top of your game, vs. enjoying a few more years of something you are supremely good at, and will never get to do again.

This whole premise for an essay is silly - if you are one of the tiny number of people in a position to make this kind of choice, are you really going to turn to some dude's blog post to make up your mind? But the sports comparison puts it over the top.
We just switched to greek gods, ran out of muppets and magic roundabout characters.
My home systems use Tolkien names, which while by no means an original idea, has the benefit that they will never run out, especially if you've read The Silmarillion. At work, the names are all music-related. I didn't start this one, but I carried it on after the admin who started it left. This also works well, aside from coworkers complaining that they can't remember how to spell 'staccato'.
Club Penguin was funded by angel investors though.
Shame on you. I was just going to bed!

Thanks :-)
The article was about entrepreneurs. It was not about your idea of startups.

Imagine an article on a web site about the NFL that began "When you think of a football player, you probably imagine someone six foot five who weighs 250 pounds. But a new study shows the average football player is actually four foot eight and weights 80 pounds." Because the average football player is actually a little league player.

So yes, the study described in the article is about founders of small businesses rather than startups (in what you call my sense, meaning the generally accepted sense of the word). But what makes it misleading is that it appears on a site about startups, begins by talking about examples of startups, and then claims it's surprising that people starting small businesses have different characteristics. It's not surprising at all that the average person opening a gas station or starting his own landscaping company is 40.
If you're trying to say -- as a sub-post said -- "don't wait for a rich man to come and give you permission to pursue your dreams," then you're not looking at the whole picture. 'FU money' doesn't mean that you go down to 'Mojito Island' and sip drinks on the beach for the rest of your life. 'FU money' is money that says, "I'm set for life."

After you have 'FU money' you don't have to worry about making tough choices to try and make ends meet. At that point, you can create another start-up or whatever it is you want to do, without needing to worry about becoming homeless at some point (or going into major debt).

I posit this example:

I like programming and working on web apps/etc. So I create
a startup to use my passion to develop a cool and marketable
idea. The idea takes off and someone wants my to cash out
to the tune of $40M.

Yes, I won't have my startup (i.e. baby) anymore, but I will
also have the freedom to create another startup, or just to
do development on whatever I like (without regard to whether
or not it is marketable). In this case, I've given up my
startup for the chance to free myself from having to say
things like, "I better stop working on this cool idea
because I have a family to feed." Or, "I really want to
work on this idea, but my mom has cancer, needs constant care,
and we can't afford to have someone looking after her."
That you are looking at people who "emigrated" to Shaker Heights also suggests a selection effect. There's really no easy answer in this case.

The problem isn't "why are blacks and whites different" but "why do blacks and whites who have similar outcomes still produce children who have different outcomes?" Three possibilities:

1. The premise is flawed; just being in Shaker Heights doesn't suggest significant uniformity.

2. Regression to the mean.

3. Culture, etc. But that begs the question of difference once again, but re: culture rather than achievements. Unless it's all hollywood's fault.
So, the 20-something founder/revolutionary is an anecdote and not a trend! I get it now!

All this verifies is the existence of the silent majority of older, more experienced founders.
The Rise of the Professional Blogger
The sacrifice trap: a human bias impeding technology adoption?
The reason is plain and simple: when you build a list for an audience, it needs to have many bullet points. So you are tempted to use the same fact twice with a slightly different take.

"2 things you didn't know about entrepreneurs" sounds less interesting/professional/worth reading that "10 things".
My father grew up as a poor white guy and had the same attitude. "I make a lot of money why strive for more?"

This attitude is quite logical and reasonable if you consider relative achievement vs. absolute achievement. If you've started out near the back of the pack economically or socially, and make good, there's no shame in enjoying the fruits of your labors and directing your focus onto other things besides competition.

Money is one measure of success, but if you're making what you consider to be enough money, you may find other uses for your time whose utility is less obvious to other people but significant to you. Autonomy is often its own reward.
I could by your comment that you got it, but it gets a little lost in the rest of the thread debating the philosophical aspects of selling out vs. plowing through.
Global Brand Rankings 2009
Jakob Nielsen: Fresh vs. Familiar: How Aggressively to Redesign
How to Avoid Internet Marketing Fraud | TechJaws: Internet Security and SEO
For the past few years, I've used New Testament cities. As time goes on and I need more, I move forward in time through Christendom.
> Jason from 37signals said they'd have a post that FU money is a myth.

I can think of one example. Nico Mak from Nico Mak computing wrote the original WinZip. About 10 years ago, he was making about $1m/month in corporate license fees. I can almost guarantee he is on his own private island somewhere, living the anonymous rich life.
You may like what you're doing, but there's no way that you can prove that you didn't eliminate your best candidates, and I'd be highly suspicious of your veracity if you told me that you've never made a bad hire in 2500 interviews. Anyone who says that they can figure out everything that they needed to know about a person by asking them to do a one-dimensional task only nominally related to the job at hand (i.e. "here's a piece of paper. draw me a diagram of digging a ditch"), is probably missing some important information.

I understand what you're saying about not caring about the coding result, and I think you're right -- too many geeks focus too much on the brain-teaser part, and not enough on the human interaction part. But even then, it's an artificial environment, and people are nervous and stiff. Newer candidates are unpracticed. Candidates who have had a few interviews are more likely to succeed. Some small number people can bullshit their way through any interview. The best you can say about an interview process is that it might give you a chance to know if you'll absolutely hate working with someone.
What is with TC constantly offering up its t-shirts as petty tributes? Who the hell actually wants one?
Maybe 5 years ago there was a billboard on the corner of Vassar and Mass Ave that was "[the first 10-digit prime in consecutive digits of pi].com"

Obviously that piqued my interest. Once solved and visited, it was simply an upload link for your resume for generic jobs at google.

So anti-climactic.