skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are you doing something wrong? Probably you are. But that is to be expected since there are so many ways to mess up. The question is whether you're learning from your mistakes.

Personally I would ask why people keep bailing on you. You had 2 professors bail on letting you complete a paper you started on. You had co-founders bail and screw you over. The people working with you on the web application didn't continue working with you. (The point being that they didn't just abandon the application, they also didn't invite you to be part of the next thing they did.)

This is a bad pattern because generally we can't succeed unless we can get other people to succeed with us. For example you're unlikely to start a successful startup without the close cooperation of a cofounder. I'm sure that circumstances are different in each case, but as the poster says, "The only commonality in all your failed relationships is you."

This strikes me as a pattern that is repeating too much for coincidence. So you need to ask why. It may be that you'll get an answer that you can't easily solve. For instance people may find you not fun to be around. If that's the case then you're unlikely to be able to change your personality. In which case you need to find someone who can get along with you as you are. However it may be something like, "you've always got 50 other projects going on, and keep on dropping the ball" in which case you can fix it. (Do fewer things at once.)

Whatever you find, be aware that you are almost certainly doing SEVERAL things consistently wrong. So once you've identified one thing to improve, don't stop there.
Swarm-dpl: A transparently scalable distributed programming language
Actually, we're going to hit profitability in a couple of months and we're at 12M uniques/#176 on quantcast (verified):
http://www.quantcast.com/mahalo.com

Mahalo 2.0 which came out in June gave us a major boost because we started giving ~40% of the revenue from topic pages to our page managers. This resulted in a LOT more page being created.

Mahalo 3.0 will be out on December 1st and it will do a better job of explaining what Mahalo is. We got a little drunk on the Korean Web design of www.naver.com and it confused folks. That was my bad... M3 will be MUCH more obvious as to what we're about (search, content and Q&A all on one page).

Best jason
Ask HN: Are you working on a Location based application?
Are you working on a location based application?
how to integrate Remember mode with org-mode:

http://orgmode.org/manual/Setting-up-Remember-for-Org.html#S...

and:
> However some things don't fit nicely into a hierarchy.

sometimes the hyperlink feature of org-mode helps with a non-tree-like structure:
http://orgmode.org/manual/Hyperlinks.html#Hyperlinks
you only need to check for divisors up to sqrt(i)

http://codepad.org/VMSqtLbS
It's the study of worldviews (loosely speaking), not a worldview.
Capitalism has its foundations in reciprocity. Instead of "I scratch your back, you scratch mine," we have "I give you money and you give me a service which I desire." All capitalism does is make a barter and trade system more efficient, allowing you to trade with someone for something you want even if you don't have anything they want. Calling that evil is sort of... dumb.
It is also theoretically possible that tinkering with wheels is pleasant. Though perhaps it's not for everyone.

It is even possible -- bear with me here -- that while rebuilding the wheel in your own way you will discover something new and interesting. Even in an ancient and venerable field like computer science, which has been picked over by dozens, perhaps even a hundred world-class minds for as long as six decades. [1]

---

[1] One of the many charms of growing older is that you come to understand things, like why older people were always rolling their eyes at you when you were seventeen. I remember back when I was young, thinking about the futuristic year 2000. "My god," I would think, "I will probably live to see the year 2000! Although I'll be 29 then, so I'll be much older."
I made a poster (actually, I've made several) years ago trying to get myself moving - the one your comment reminded me of is:

Commit through Action : Do It!

That one has actually helped as a reminder, but I keep falling back into studying instead of doing.
You dislike verbose, repetitive writing because its information content is low. Taut, clear prose has high information content. The taut, clear prose you are talking about is usually higher in total content than masses of verbose, repetitive writing, despite the quantity of words. I mean "information" in the information theoretic sense, especially in the semi-informal "extent to which the words are a surprise" sense (which I find the most useful formulation for measuring English text, though note there's a relative component to that definition).

It is not surprising that more effort is required to create more information. I don't see where we need a new theory here.
That's a tad simplistic. Capitalism rewards the externalising of costs - so, for instance, decreasing your unit costs by increasing your pollution is more profitable. You need external regulation to make sure that decisions are not made solely on a capitalist basis, because that would make them entirely heartless.
Domaining - Insure.com sells for $16mm
What Caused the Sidekick Failure?
Interested is a choice. Once you decide that you're going to make an effort to know more about something or someone, it becomes much easier to find common ground -- and at your stage in the game, you need to find as much common ground as you can. The ability to befriend people of many different backgrounds is a strength that will reward you in the future.

Also, not for nothing, but your stories (repeated abandonment by professors, peers, etc.) strongly suggest to me that you're missing important social cues. The research-paper anecdotes, in particular, tell me that you're doing something wrong. No professional academic or journal would take a paper submitted by a high-school student seriously without lots of personal mentoring. If you did have a faculty mentor, they wouldn't simply abandon you without cause. You're missing something important.
At first I thought you were defining a philosopher when you wrote "but never feel like they know enough to start" then I thought it is just the opposite they alway know enough to start but have a never ending story.

I also understood your question to exclude the person who can just afford to study perpetually, just for the love of learning similar to 18-19th century aristocracy.

So we are looking for a name for 'fear to start'. Excluding procrastination we replace fear->phobia, since phobia is Greek we will replace 'start' with 'archi' which results in:

- archiphobia : fear to start

To be honest I am envious of people who can just afford to do that:)
I meant the answers to Ask HN style postings, not the actual postings themselves.
Fugitive.vim: a Git wrapper so awesome, it should be illegal
The ControlMaster is a great feature. We use SSH as a mechanism for running remote monitoring plugins in Nagios, using the ControlMaster socket socket saves us a lot of crypto overhead.
Really strong beginning just to spoil it in the second part with his own opinions about the scientific method and how to make conclusions.

In my opinion this single topic is impossible to fit in a presentation. A book is more reasonable format. I would recommend "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"
whereby advanced means basic
I find Mr. Moore no more altruistic than the various "evils" that he frequently attacks. His methods are equally as dubious as his opponents--the difference is he masks himself as a benevolent crusader.
That's a nice ROI.

Anybody interested in a nice two letter domain for a fraction of that ;) ?
actually, our goal is to get into the top 100 sites in the next year and the top 50 two years from now.

If we do that we'll have a really nice business, and to be honest I'm not interested in flipping this one. Like Evan Williams with Twitter, I'm long on this startup after having sold my last one quickly.

No regrets selling Weblogs, Inc. after only 18 months. In fact, it was an amazing deal that set me up to raise $20M to build something on the scale of About.com (top 20 site), eHow (top 30), Yahoo Answers (top 20) or perhaps even Wikipedia (top 10!).

I think we have a good chance to grow as large as About.com or eHow... getting to Wikipedia level, well, that's a little out of my control, but I'm going to try really hard.

In terms of being a VC I've thought about it, but for now I'm just going to do 2-4 small invetments (25-50k) a year. So far I've done two this year: www.challengepost.com and www.gdgt.com. Both of which are really great ideas with big potential. I love the entrepreneurs behind each of these... hopefully I can find a couple of these a year.

all the best, @jason
Seems like wild conjecture; have they got any sources?
I have absolutely no idea whatsoever what he is talking about. Maybe it's all above my head :/ Did it make any sense to anyone else?
Seeking Energy Savings at the Heart of the Internet
It is a fact in a meaning that you either accept it or all other statements about epistemology lose its meaning
As a paying customer, I'm disappointed they dropped one of the services that prompted me to move to GitHub.
What's replacing P2P, BitTorrent as pirate hangouts?
He says:

Popper’s principle implies: (1) Your guesses and opinions have to be testable.
They have to say what will not happen.
Beware of vague predictions that are compatible with any outcome!

But that is Popper's view as to the demarcation of science. Popper was not of the view that science is the only realm of legitimate knowledge. And it's in conflict with:

If all knowledge depends on physical measurement, then not only do you lose truth, beauty, and love, you also lose mathematics, logic, and even epistemology!
Quick update: I've got a MAJOR smoking gunS from my investigation including a dozen or so folks who paid to present and who feel they were ripped off.

I've also got someone from inside on of the angel groups who has defected and has told me flat out that these are money making scams.

The Keiretsu Forum says they charge "only $1,500" but I'm told from insiders they make you pitch all four chapters... so it's really $6,000!

The best way to stop this is to a) not pitch at them, b) spread the word and c) for angel investors to boycott them.

I'm going to start an open angel forum if these guys don't drop their fees.
Science Fiction!
"I liked this feature, but I think it makes sense for them to remove it. To me it highlights the fact the Github has grown way beyond just hosting Ruby projects."

Then another option would have been to do the same thing for non-Ruby projects. Integrate with CPAN; build eggs (or whatever it is that Python uses); create Cabal packages.
Indeed. You're taking the effort of making it once, but the collective readers are taking the effort of reading it tens, hundreds or thousands of times.
My point of view is this.

Capitalism is the most effective way known of getting people to do what it gets them to do. However you have no control of what that is.

Therefore if you want to have clean water supplies, universal education, national defense, police, unproductive people not starving in the streets, etc then you need to divert some resources away from capitalism. This is the justification for taxation and government.

The justification for Michael Moore's point of view is that he wants to see those things happen, and capitalism doesn't do that very well.

However be very careful about using government to try to direct capitalism to meet your goals. Because well-meaning interventions regularly fail spectacularly due to unintended consequences. One of which is that any influential group that is regulated by government will try (and eventually usually succeeds) in getting control over their regulators.
All systems reward the externalizing of costs, by definition.
Yes, but the community can develop the extensions for various purposes instead of Microsoft developing everything. That's what I meant. Obviously most word users don't know scripting and don't care to learn.
"Are we supposed to move back to ruby forge?"

I moved my gems to gems.neurogami.com. It's easy enough, and I trust myself more than the Next Hot Host.

While I appreciate the value of It Just Works when comes to installing gems, there's also value in users making deliberate choices about where they get they code they are installing.
What I meant was exactly what btn said. Fucked up companies are behind the clouds, so this does show the dangers of the cloud.
US facing dearth of skilled workforce
Tutorial on Creating Really Teensy ELF Executables for Linux
I don't think that's really the right way to think of it. Capitalism acknowledges greed, and builds a system that can survive and bring virtue in spite of it, and to some extent, because of it.

While it's OK to decry greed, it isn't OK to build an economic system based on the idea that people aren't greedy. They are. There are billions of year of history behind the greed of humanity, and I'm not exaggerating. If you build an economic system based on something that is, fundamentally, not human, you will get bad results.

That's where other systems tend to fall down, and why for all the "failures" of capitalism, the worst off in a modern capitalistic society is better than all but the best off in almost any other society.

I'm willing to listen to other economic systems that also acknowledge greed. I recommend the book "Accelerando" for a half-decent exploration of the question of whether there is something better once you have pervasive computerization. But the solution to the problem of greed isn't trying to build a system based on the belief that there is some way to make people not greedy.

Greed is not capitalism's fault. Greed is, ultimately, traceable back to the fact that for every live form that survive to reproduce, there are thousands that don't. Greed may look odd in the incredibly, utterly strange place we currently find ourselves in where we have more resources than we know what to do with, but this is the strangeness, not greed.

I'm pretty skeptical of every other system I've ever seen, including socialism and communism, because they are basically built on the idea that we'll take control away from the greedy, shortsighted people and give it to the enlightened, ungreedy ones who will run things better. There is of course the (perfectly correct) argument that the information flow of such a system can't be made to work with the tools we have, but there is also the even-more-fundamental problem that the "enlightened, ungreedy" class of people doesn't exist. There are only people claiming to be the enlightened, ungreedy class. Until you can build a non-capitalist system that isn't based on this fundamental failure, it's not going to do well.

(That said, I'm only a little-l libertarian and I acknowledge that the government does have a place. I'm talking economic system here, not whole society system. Just as capitalism harnesses greed, instead of denying it, a government should harness capitalism, instead of denying it.)
I wasn't clear or you're blurring information content and density and thereby missing my point (!). Consider:

- VERBOSE: “One of the best things you can do for
yourself to improve your writing is to learn
how to cut out words that are not
necessary.”

- TAUT: “To improve your writing, cut out
unnecessary words.”

In at least the senses I care about I don't see any information in TAUT absent from VERBOSE; if you see any such information TAUT please do point it out.

Which is what I was getting at: TAUT prose communicates identical thoughts with fewer words; why is it so difficult and unnatural to generate?

I find this curious. I now have some suspicions but nothing extremely well-formed.

(!) You'd be right that in the context of essays-for-school the target wordcount is predetermined and information is expensive so the lazy satisfy the requirement(s) with the verbal equivalent of double-spacing + jumbo font.
Life is a balance. I agree with your point that if you are looking to run a company or multiple companies you will live a challenging and rewarding life. But to be successful you will need to foster relationships.

You should not shut out people just because they talk about sports, cars, or whatever when they first meet you. Everyone has something to teach you. Even when you are the smartest kid in the room you can always learn something from someone. Your challenge is to get past the bullshit smalltalk and get to the meat of conversation that you both find mutual interest in.
But it's not necessarily true that if "verbose
repetitive writing", has less information content than
"taut clear prose". They could have the same information content, just the former has used more bits to describe the same information (i.e. is less compressed). I guess his question is why
some people naturally produce the former and not the latter. Perhaps they just haven't performed the necessary computation required to compress the information while they were learning it, i.e. compression could either take place while they are storing the information in memory, or else during the editing process.
Jason seems to be one of the few established entrepreneurs reaching out to help startups. I think he only has positive ideas.

I'd like to see more of this - if you've made it then help others starting out. Surely there's a load of that type out there!?
"Baby Boomer"
How so? Or, how so in comparison to other economic systems?
I made one of my sites nonprofit. Unfortunately this did two things: gave me less incentive to promote it, and caused problems when it came to creative strategies to market it.

EDIT: Also caused problems when it came to sustaining it fiscally.
Because this was the list of top universities, not of every possible institution. MIPT for instance, once of the top physics powerhouses is absent as well.

A university has a wide scope of taught subjects and substantial variety of curriculum, which makes them a separate category in academic world. And the list was of that particular category, that's it.
University Professor
He could have started with the main line. This would have made the article better.

There is saying: "Cheapness is the mother of misery"
Low Cost Product Feature Information
My partner and I come from an academic background in information extraction and we would like to gauge interest in a potential service that would provide cheap product feature information for products in various web catalogs such as amazon.com and ebay.com. We imagine that the service would be subscription-based and would provide extracted values such as price, weight, dimensions, physical memory size, etc for a wide range of products. The service would cost less than $100 a month. Though a lot of sites are offering APIs with some feature information, we have noticed that much of the information is still in "raw" format- not ready to use.
Brings to mind the masses of spaghetti code, with thousands of embeded SQL queries, that power(ed) many very successful sites.
what do you have?

edit: oh, ya ww.com! How on earth did you pick that up? I thought two letter .coms were reserved.
This sounds like a great idea, but I still have the same question floating in my mind, why would a company want to do such thing when they can just imitate my service and release it themselves? (I say this because I know they have the infrastructure to do so) That's what's bothering me.
Couchdproxy: simple proxy to ease hosting of multiple couchdb behind one IP
Actual quote: "Instead of doing what’s easy for you, do what’s easy for your reader."

But that actual quote is an important point, expressed in few words: many inexperienced writers are "in love with the sound of their own voice" and forget to put themselves in the position of the reader.
After the Sidekick fiasco, should we be afraid to store data in the cloud?
> How on earth did you pick that up?

I paid a boatload of money for it. It's actually a funny story because 'weight watchers' wanted it too and I was just a bit quicker. They had to have a few meetings to get the deal done and the seller was under quite a bit of pressure, I was ready cash in hand so I got it.

> I thought two letter .coms were reserved.

One letter domains are, two letter domains are just like any other.
Gladwell: How different are dogfighting and football?
Probably not what most people here are looking for, but my epic failures as a rationalist are recorded in this LW sequence: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Yudkowsky%27s_coming_of_age
When I was in college, I wanted it all - wanted to prove theorems, found companies, join politics and so on. As I got older, I realized that just getting deeply focused on one thing gives you all manner of creative opportunities. Pick one area, and get in deeper and deeper - that would be my advice.
Here is a related project: http://codenode.org
I get tired just thinking about ways to save money. I'm not a big spender by any means, and my road to frugality begins and ends with one question "Do I REALLY need it and will it help me be happier or more productive?" (ok, that's really 3 related questions). I'd rather spend my limited brainpower in other ways. I also don't want to look back on my life and point to being cheap as a primary driver.
I'm not condemning you.

But I don't understand how you could be applying pursuing so many disparate career paths while also solidly understanding your own values. Finance has little to do with value-creation, and more with wealth accumulation; research has more to do with the progress of science (and possibly the recognition of greatness), and (typically) little to do with wealth-creation. Same goes for writing.

You are not going to get anywhere if you spread your faculties too thinly. Figure out what you want to do and then pursue it seriously. By the way, I applied for about ~350 jobs before finding my current gig. I tried sales, finance, tech, business development ... I didn't find my current job (which kicks ass) until I buckled down and focused all my efforts on landing a tech job.
Random observation. "Can still control them" and "Can usefully control them" are two different things. For instance there is a genetic disorder where people are born with 6 fingers on each hand. However you still only have nerves to your brain for 5 fingers, and the last finger is just a copy of your little finger. You literally can't do anything with the one without doing the same thing with the other.

That was more detail than people probably wanted to know.
I don't think an even split is expected (or even suggested -- consider that Sequoia takes around 30% only!), but a good rule of thumb is that, prefunding, someone who joins is a cofounder. It really changes your perspective when you're part of a team with a vision, maybe some duct-tape prototype, and the idea that, come hell or high water, they're in this together.

Bill Joy joined Sun after the founding. One of my partners joined us later, too, They are absolutely cofounders.

That said, the biggest red flag? Dishonesty. If you smell a whiff of it, I would advise serious caution.