skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Kohana looks promising, never heard of it before.

From Wikipedia: "The principal reason for the fork was to create a more community-based web application framework as many users were frustrated with CodeIgniter's lack of bug fixes and inclusion of new features requested by the community."
Unlike the rest, I ask, "why wait?".

I'm sure the school you go to has great resources. I'm a freshman at Emory and even though there is no reputation for startups here, the business school and the library still offer extraordinary resources. I've been emailing around searching for local business men to connect with.

If you reach out you will find people with similar interests and I have found partnership to be a superb motivator for getting stuff done.

Persistence is key.
Because processor technologies aren't designed the weekend before they're shipped. AMD's x86-64 technology (aka 64-bit) was publicly announced in 1999 (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64-bit). It likely was in planning stages years earlier.

When was the first time you needed x64? (i.e. when did you run into the 4GB ram wall?) This year, maybe. Last year at earliest. That's more than a 10 year gap from when a technology was conceived and when it was needed.
OTOH getting Amazon to acknowledge a problem if it is isolated to your instance may keep you up all night as a recent post about a DOS attack highlighted, so I wouldn't say you're exactly off the hook when it comes to support of your site just because you don't control the hardware.

[EDIT] The post I was referring to: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=860414
If it looks like FUD, sounds like FUD, and feels like FUD, it's probably FUD. Just a theory, but I'd argue that it's probably easier to get grants and to get published when you're "saving the world from disaster," as opposed to the much less romantic title of "the cyclical nature of ocean temperature and its effects on global climate." Probably more press and attention too.

How about we stop polluting and start recycling because it's the right thing to do, instead of irrational fears of Waterworld-like outcomes.

(Not a global warming denier, just a global warming more evidence want-to-see-er)
1. Switch from PHP to Ruby (on rails).
2. Switch from Windows to OS X.
3. Meditates.
What's the best way to start for someone who doesn't want their entire internet identity tied with up Yahoo, Google, or Facebook?
Have you taken a look at Wiznotes? This is specifically designed for students however professionals are also finding it useful. It is not just note taking software, it is a productivity tool to help students succeed in their exams.

Eli Cohen
Mesoraware (Wiznotes is a division of Mesoraware)
(This was posted here because it is relevant to this article)
perhaps because they don't remember? As far as I can tell, life gets better as you get older and gain more control over your life. Childhood was miserable for me.

I mean, physically, yeah, it's pretty much all downhill from there. but everything else gets much better.

I would not worry too much if your social life doesn't pick up until you are a little older. Mine did not.

Also note, if you don't connect with your peers, consider finding new peers. For me, moving to the San Francisco bay area (I'm in the south bay) has massively improved my social opportunities. Also, as you get older, the other nerds start to come out of their shells. At your age, many of them either studiously avoid other people or pretend to not be nirds.
Why do you want to an "entrepreneur"? What does that mean to you?

I don't see a passion for any particular project or idea in your question. I would expect that someone that really wanted to be an entrepreneur, right from their college days, would have moved in that direction somehow -- either by saving funds away so they could do it without disrupting their family, or by working on something on the side in their spare time.

Your question sounds more like it's coming from someone that likes the idea of being an entrepreneur, the 1990's version of, "I want to be an inventor too!" Being an entrepreneur means lots of long days; late or sleepless nights; lots of risk as you bank your welfare, and your family's, on the success of your new business. You don't have marketing or management experience, and those are helpful skills for someone trying to start a new small business.

The majority of startups fail, whether they're a local brick-and-mortar store or a webware-2.0 shindig. The odds are stacked against you. So, what will you do if it doesn't work out? What would you do differently to ensure that your outcome is more successful?

What do you dislike about what you're doing now? Is it just not "sexy" enough? Are you bored, or unchallenged? A side project, or a new job in your career, or even working for an established startup, would all be more logical choices than launching your own business.
Scheduling my day the night before in Google Calendar. And then when I don't meet the schedule, I alter it so that the schedule then becomes a journal.

It offers amazing perspective and turns vague concepts like when I got to sleep, and when I actually played video games into solid temporal events.
How greatly does atmospheric CO2 dissolve into ocean water? What's the effective volume of water that CO2 will dissolve into? I assume that surface water will have more carbonic acid than deep water. What's the CO2 capacity function of water? As more CO2 goes into solution, it will get harder to put more into solution at the same temperature and pressure.

And then: what is the change in atmospheric CO2 levels in the past several centuries?

In all, I'm having a hard time believing that man-made atmospheric CO2 is creating biologically significant carbonic acid concentrations in ocean water near reefs.

[citation needed]
Be sure to check out the "Story of Mel," linked from one of the comments on the article:

http://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html

A bit more HN worthy than the buggy graffiti, perhaps.
From what I understand 128-bit is for HDD allocation purposes only. Memory allocation / everything else will stay 64 bit. Very large disk storage units is looking like it will challenge the 64-bit architecture in the coming years - for the heaviest users.
The bubbly stuff is supposedly bad for your teeth if you drink too much of it.

Googled a bit and found this collection of links to articles about possible effects: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=1006
That's all fine and dandy, but that wasn't the story just a few years ago. Back then there were some Russians scientists, as I recall, that predicted the solar cycle would prevail over anything else. They were called "deniers"
I'd much rather have "login with openid" rather than seeing "login with twitter ; login with facebook ; login with posterous" or whichever subset of sites any random service thinks is most valuable to support.

The great thing about login/identity/authentication standards is that there are so many to choose from. Didn't we learn the first time around with web browser capabilities to avoid this kind of fragmentation again?
Logicomix - Cal prof Papadimitriou's comic book about Bertrand Russell and logic
Wanderlust (Emacs Email client).

I use it with gmail imap interface. Completely changed the way I manage emails.

http://www.gohome.org/wl/
Use another OpenID provider, such as https://www.myopenid.com/

Or you can host your own.

See here for a good list: http://openid.net/get-an-openid/

I initially wasn't too impressed by OpenID, but I was sold by the third site I got to use my login. It's value is really tied to the adoption by sites.

It's especially nice on small blogs: you don't have post anonymously if you are averse to signups.
Confessions of a homeschooler
Yes. There seems to be a common thread here. You are taking on way more than you, or really anybody, can handle. I mean, seriously---a program to model the stock market? That's why everybody else keeps bailing out. Anyway, if you get a bit more realistic (don't read: less ambitious), then I'm sure you'll be a lot more successful.

Failure is actually a good thing, as long as you learn from it. And it looks like you've got plenty of material in that regard.
Chile seems like a great place to live while working on a foreign startup (located in another, zero-tax jurisdiction). As a non-citizen tourist in the country, you'd pay no income tax locally. I'd far prefer to live in Chile than the zero-tax places (UAE, Panama, etc.) Of course, a totally virtualized business could be run from basically anywhere on the same terms.
I think it was pretty good. Its not really for people who don't know math, but for people (like me) who know some math but have never looked into the paradox. The key here is to explain what pieces means and the whole cloud idea. With that, I sorta get it (I think so anyway, I'd need to understand the proof better to see if my intuitive feeling is correct).

That being said, I notice a problem immediately. Why do we need 4 pieces? From the explanation, its pretty much giving a sort of "algorithm" for creating the 4 (or 5) pieces. Essentially, start somewhere, and go around and around, and put each "atom" into one of 4 sets. I.e. the first "atom" goes into the first bucket, the second atom into the second bucket, etc... Then, take bucket 1 and 2, and translate them (really just to avoid intersection) and then rotate set 2 so that the atoms are "half way" between those of set 1, and do the same rotation for bucket 4.

So... why not just call buckets 1 and 3 "bucket A" and buckets 3 and 4 "bucket B" and just do the translation?

I know enough to know that my "algorithm" doesn't work, but its what the intuition here suggests. So, there is still some gap in my understanding.

I'm curious how far an intuitive explanation can go. I'll take a look at the link someone else gave below, but does anyone have an intuitive answer to my question?
Saucelabs actually looks like just what I've been needing.
Citation requested; citation given:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/318/5857/1737
Jaw bone created from stem cells
Hey -- as someone who thought similar things at that age, you probably have quite a few skills from all those bruises. Very few people are writing multiple web apps, multiple papers, etc. at 18.

My advice to you would be to seek out a mentor who sees themself in you. That could be a graduate student, a young prof, or an entrepreneur.

Forget all that shit about "socializing". Completely agree that things get better as you get older. Clubs are overrated. Work out hard and get a decently hot girlfriend if you want. But then get back to work.

PS: stay ambitious. Read Richard Hamming on ambition.
PSS: Look for a mentor that is where you want to be when you are their age. You need to find someone who you respect technically and who wants to teach you, to give you their wisdom to help the young version of themselves avoid all the mistakes they've made.
Maybe you're trying to do too much? Perhaps you could find something which you are really passionate about and work at doing it the best you can.

Looks like a lot of the time you've been doing things for or with other people. Why not think of something you are really passionate about and do it exclusively for a while. Do it for yourself, not anyone else. That way you only need to be persistent to succeed. And you never know, there might be other people out there that like it and want to use it too.
Youth is carefree, where responsibility doesn't bear down you like a hammer. Youth is a time of learning, one of my favorite activities. Once you get older, you've got bills, jobs, internal politics, disappointments, and in some ways less freedom. And while you are happy, you are not happy in the way that you were in college.

More does NOT equal or mean better. The startup world is a great example of that.

P.S. - There is nothing wrong with parties, dating, sports, and clubs. In moderation of course.
Have you checked http://www.swaroopch.com/blog/where-to-find-startup-jobs-in-...
You are not focused.

If people gave up after one or two failures, nothing would get accomplished.

- Wrote a program to model the stock market

Everyone wants to do this, but unless you have insider information like Goldman Sachs or some rare mathematical insight that a million PhDs have overlooked, you are likely to fail. The stock market is a zero-sum game where most of the profits go to the high end of a Pareto distribution. This is too ambitious for you.

- Worked on a paper with a professor.

Unless you are a genius, I doubt any of these professors would be working with you seriously instead of just being free lab labor. Your knowledge is most likely too shallow to be useful in high-tech research that gets all the grants. However, this might be your goal if you want to go to grad school.

- Tried to start a company over the summer.

Keep trying.

- Applied for X internships

You are too young. There is also a recession so you can lower your expectations.

- Half a dozen math/science contests

There's something wrong with your plan if you have the time for half a dozen of them.

- Tried to start a blog, worked on it for two years.

Link?
Photoshop comes to the iPhone
To be honest, I say keep trying and don't get discouraged. While joecode is correct that you might need to be more realistic about some of your goals, if you keep trying, you will find success, even if it's modest.

If you're interested in doing another webapp, I say do one start-to-finish completely on your own. That way, you don't have to rely on the dedication of other people for it to be successful. Also, try to reach out and find other people interested in tech entrepreneurship at your school - I've found a surprising amount here (Washington University in St. Louis) just by poking around.
It's hard to tell just from your post, but so far it sounds like you're more of a "starter" than a "finisher" -- you're not following through enough on your projects to keep them going. I'm not an expert on your life, so this is just a guess.

However, the one that really stands out for me is: "Did another webapp for one of the student clubs. (Someone else also wrote one and theirs was better, so everyone (including me) just used that instead.)"

In your other examples, there were external factors that created large barriers to finishing the project. That happens sometimes, but with this one, you simply ... gave up.

There's not necessarily a negative connotation there; you could have made a perfectly logical decision after factoring in your interest in the project, the amount of work it would take to compete with the other webapp, and whether you had any immediate ideas that would make your version better. But, it looks like you're asking why you haven't been successful yet, and here's a case where there really wasn't anything stopping you.

Aside from that, I think most folks here have a pretty big stack of failures and dead projects. I sure do -- I've even lost track of them. I've got failures in inventions, big what-if ideas, political ventures, software projects, business leads, and on and on.

As long as you're able to get something valuable out of those failures, some lesson or some insight or some social connections or something, then it's not really a failure.

It's just more experience.
World's Biggest Golden Coin of 1 Million Dollar
"stories" are the tragedy with science. I don't care who was called what and who changed stance. All I need to know is both sides of the argument and the strengths of their respective evidences.
And that you dont have to worry in case your site get a spike due to it being slashdotted.

The other advantage I can think of is to see if a better configuration would help scalability needs. For e.g. if I think a x-bit x-core box would work better for my app, there isnt a need to buy the whole thing before knowing it does no good. I could just pick one from the cloud and pay only for usage.
Well, according to Wikipedia, 32 bit architectures started to come around in the 60s. We reached the 32-bit memory wall in some applications at earliest 1990. Thats 30 years to go between the first 32-bit archs and the "topping out of them." Then, you need to remember that this is an exponential change in address space, not a linear one. 2^64 is MUCH MUCH bigger than 2^32, you can't just think of it as "twice as much." In the 60s, they thought 4 billion bytes would be much more than they would ever need, but 32 bit's headroom was just 1000 times more than the biggest they used in that day (assuming 4MB, even though IBM's System/360 could access 8MB, which in that case the headroom would only be 500 times as much memory). 64 bit tops out at about 17.2 billion GB, and if we estimate that today's common RAM size is 2GB, the headroom we have for 64 bit is about 8.6 billion times what most computers have commonly today. That means that the headroom for 64 bit is 8.6 MILLION times the headroom that was in 32-bit. For some reason I think that it will take us much longer to fill up 64-bit than it did for us to use up 32-bit.
If you code in your spare time, it could simply mean that what you do for work isn't challenging or satisfying enough. If you're a good programmer you need to make something beautiful, you need to leave your fingerprint somewhere. If you can do it at work, good; if you can't, you can't not do in the evenings...

It can be a drag though. Few people can do actual coding more than 5-6 hours a day when they're in the good shape. Trying to do a good job and still satisfy your own itches the same day may not be possible, either.
1. It's a good idea to partner with people, but pick projects where you don't depend on your partners to finish. Pick a problem/domain where if everything else failed you could at least push out a minimal version to see if you can get traction.

2. For abandoned projects, salvage the scraps - publish the drafts or parts of them, open-source your code (unless it still holds significant value, but don't overestimate the potential value).

3. You seem ambitious and not easily discouraged - both valuable characteristics. So keep trying, but be on the lookout for blind spots, and patterns in your failed projects. Distill your strengths and preferences and see how you can apply them best, and work around your weaknesses.

4. Make sure you're not someone else's "useful idiot" (and obviously, don't exploit others).

5. As others have mentioned here - enjoy your life, seriously! Don't race to the presumed finish line. (Read Philip Greenspun's article on early retirement). You should always strive to pursue something that you find personally meaningful. What's the big picture of what all your efforts are really for? Sitting in a vault of cash by yourself like Scrooge McDuck won't make you happy.

6. Unless you want to become an academic or consultant/i-banker, don't worry too much about your GPA, but meet and work with as many people as possible. Make friends and test-drive them for productive pursuits. College (and I guess grad school) are statistically almost the last stops for finding co-founders. Just look at startups you respect, and look up the founders' stories - the vast majority met at the latest at university.
They rebranded "global warming" in recent years to be "global climate change". That way no matter which way the temperature goes they can't be wrong. Michael Criton talks about this in his fact based fictional book "State of Fear".
We use Lighthouse here, I don't love it, but definitely don't hate it. It does what we need, more than GitHub's integrated tracker failed to do.
Adaptive games promise high scores for everyone
Moving from physical servers to EC2 (with reserved instances, that cut the hourly prices significantly) saved me $300 a month.

And I feel much less stress now that I'm "in the cloud". If a server breaks, one click starts a new instance with the apps and configuration already in place. If a virtual hard drive crashes, one click restores a snapshot.
I'm no one to assess Jason's gifts of prophecy, so he may be right on target as to what now "looms" as potential disruptor:

> Applications will be much less visible.

> Service applications will grow like wildfire.

> Applications will be seen more as components, or capabilities, than distinct and unique units of software.

> True object-oriented applications will become a reality.

> The conversation container will become the new AppStore.

I hope some HN vets will share their nominees, since I tend to bet on real disruptions coming from what's off the radar completely, rather than what's "looming."
Where to place backend administration tools?
I was curious how everyone here manages to secure the backend administration tools which control various aspects of your apps data. What I mean is where do you put the app that manages the data inside your app.

We were thinking of placing this app on a different domain with ultra-secure passwords, possibly accessible only via IP. The initial page would be totally non-de-script so any scans would just see a login screen. The ultra-secure passwords enforcement would help with brute force attacks, might even force passwords to be reset every few weeks.

What are your thoughts? Do you use VPN regulated access only? RSA secure keys?
Site isn't loading for me anymore. Either it got overloaded or someone figured out how to tie it up.. That was quick. Haha.
It's never too late. As most people have pointed out, most entrepreneurs are older than you expect. The kids who build successful businesses at 20 get all the press because they're the exception, not the rule.

There's lots of examples out there: Jay Adelson founded Digg at 34 and Revision3 at 35. William Hanna and Joe Barbera founded Hanna-Barbera Productions when they were both pushing fifty. You're never too old to get going.

I deeply believe this, because I'm in a similar boat (early thirties and married). Speaking from personal experience, your age will be an advantage more than an impediment. Age gives you experience, and hopefully some maturity and perspective as well. Those will serve you well in a new business venture.

Only one caveat - Make sure that your family is supportive. Starting a new business is a roller coaster, and it helps immeasurably to have the emotional backup. If your wife isn't on board with the idea, then take time to win her over before you take the plunge.

Now, go out there and do it! The only thing holding you back at this point is you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUSo6ehRCHI&feature=relat... is 10k FPS, so I suspect the shots of the bullet deforming at ~7min is probably close to 1mil FPS.
See also prior discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=846451
Having an understanding and making smart decisions don't always go hand in hand. I suspect many people know what they are doing is bad for their financial health but simply don't have the will power to do the right thing in the near term because the adverse consequences only come years down the road.
Norway is the Most Desirable Place to Live, According to UN
Exactly. Unlike with any particular dogma, science, by definition is supposed to change its "stance" as new evidence becomes available.
Jay Adelson founded Digg?
Isn't lack of education across the board a big part of the reason many people are in the "bottom tier" to begin with?
Simple version of B-T in 1D:

http://www.math.ucla.edu/~tao/resource/general/121.1.00s/tar...
If you check your local newspaper you'll find people offering ironing services, you should try ringing them up and asking if they'll do laundry as well, then you get your laundry washed and ironed.
I manage things by SSHing in to my server.
SO isn't oriented around debate but around solving specific problems. I've asked many questions whose answers I needed. I've often gotten answers but not always. In this sense, "threads" or debates on some external issue are already a fail for SO's intent. I'm sure they're there but they're the exception.

Also - it takes 0 karma to answer a question and you get unlimited space. It takes 50 karma to leave a comment and you get about 200 words. If you've got lots of knowledge, you should have answered the question rather than tried to leave a comment on someone else's answer.