skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Stop trying to look smart."

Look smart to who? I studiously avoid mentioning any of this to anyone at my school for fear of seeming arrogant.

"It has the intellectual content of a whiffle ball, and the only reason to do it is to collect money, generally from the gullible or the corrupt."

Yup. I did these things entirely for the purpose of making money and not for the intellectual challenges, because money is useful and I'm currently broke.

"And real investors (as opposed to gamblers and shills) don't waste time modeling the market, because they've all read Malkiel."

Google Renaissance Technologies.

"Where do you find all this time?"

College is not very demanding. My usual load is two technical courses and two nontechnical courses, which take up 10 * 2 + 6 * 2 = 32 hours a week.

"You claim to be interested in physics; do you understand Maxwell's equations, stat mech, quantum decoherence, general relativity?"

Yes, yes, yes, somewhat (working on it).

"You claim an interest in math; have you run out of math courses?"

I will next year at my current pace.

"Chemistry: Do you understand the band structure of solids?"

Yup.

"Do you know what siRNA is"

Nope, thanks for the link.

"can you do graduate-level molecular biology lab work?"

I probably could given a month or so of training, but I seriously doubt any professor would let me because of my age and my relative lack of bio courses.

"Computers: Have you finished SICP, learned operating systems and algorithms?"

I haven't written my own OS or programming language if that's what you mean, but I find solving problems that have already been solved a zillion times better by thousands of other people working together over decades to be distasteful; what's the point?

"Have you even considered linguistics, or geology, or anthropology?"

Yes. I know some geology and anthropology but find linguistics boring.

"Study any foreign languages?"

Yes, I find them quite boring, it's basically just a great deal of memorization by rote.

"How's your music theory?"

Music cannot be explicitly taught in the same way that any of these other things can. I'm not sure how it can be taught, actually. I could probably become good at it given several thousand hours of work but don't see the point in investing that much time.
Talking about what finishing might mean may be a good place to start the book.

There are similar number of typical "finishes" as "starts" I'd argue once you segment different types of startups. Some want to make enough to not have to work; some enough to be really rich without raising $; some to get acquired etc.

Just like there are some that start with applying to YC, some which start with coding, some that start with finding a cofounder.

Of course, there is a vast number that would like to do multiple things from each list(ie. get rich from profits THEN get acquired).
Cell growth isn't independent of the cells around them.

For example if you get cut the cells around a gap will send out external signals (send and pray) which might cause other cells to start growing. Once the gap is filled (i.e. the cells are adjacent to each other) the surrounding cells will again send out signals to tell them "Stop! Space is getting tight!".

Sometimes its also the other way (or a combination of both) and a cell will detect an empty area and grow.

Here's a link to a game to show how cell growth works:
http://nobelprize.org/educational_games/medicine/2001/cellcy...
I tried to figure out why he couldn't log to more than one machine using the same connection to martha?

ssh martha ->
ssh waldo -> do stuff -> exit
ssh othermachine -> do stuff -> exit
exit

Port-forwarding surely works but did he explain the origins of this problem somewhere?
It kinda looks like a testing tool, but I don't get what this actually is about. A 1-sentence description of why I need this tool, rather than a list of features, would be much more helpful.
Agreed! Most likely that's because "starting" a business is very well defined and essentially the same for everyone, but "finishing" it (successfully) is person-specific. Is a successful finish an IPO, M&A, or turning it into a "built to last" company? Is it measured simply in the satisfaction? etc...

Update: When I started writing this, there were no other comments with the same sentiment. When I posted, there were two, one of which was from "11 minutes ago". I didn't spend 11 minutes writing it, so what happened?
When I read this it immediately reminded me of King Bruce and the spider story. I googled and found the link http://www.longlongtimeago.com/llta_history_bruce.html

I see all these setbacks of yours as stepping stones to success, plus you are only 18. In other words you are learning thing's earlier. Keep trying and soon you will be rewarded.
"Sorry, but you're not going to be able to get a finance internship and a research internship and a coding internship at the same time, while also becoming a writer."

Of course not. I apply for all of these internships at once so that, if one fails (as they often do), I have backup plans.

"(figure out why people like talking about sports and dating and parties and clubs and stuff...hint: it happens for a reason, try to be open-minded and understand that everyone is human)"

I'm not condemning them or anything, just saying that we're different. Indeed, if anything, you (and many others here) seem to be condemning me for being different.
I am working on a service for game developers that lets them add multiuser activities to end-user apps (say, an iPhone game). The difference from other services is that we host referees server side to watch over or officiate activities. The referees are created by the developers themselves, and since they run server side, deployment, cheat prevention, and client app creation are greatly simplified. Client apps become semi-dumb terminals. None of this is web based.
Consciousness, Dune and Abu Ghraib
For full discussion, including various proposed definitions and the problems of identifying species from fossils, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species
Wont vote for lists like this unless you take the time to tell me why I should read them. I have some of those books, others I'm not so sure about.

Here are the ones there that I agree with for sure:

* Growing a business. It has stood the test of time, and despite being about a non high tech business, is still quite relevant in terms of general advice. Buy this instead of the 37 signals book.

* Art of the Start. It's brief and to the point. Nothing earth shattering.

The Innovator's Dilemma is good too, but is very summarizable, in my opinion.
He's not talking about your projects. Give yourself time and stop being so hard on yourself.

A lot of your apparent failures will seem completely meaningless in the future. I would count doing poorly in match/science contests under those, as well as the blog. Are those things really important in the long run?

And some of your other failures will be very important in the years to come. You've already learnt how badly things can blow up if you don't formalise your business arrangements in writing, for example.

It's sounds cliche, but set some concrete goals for where you want to be 5 to 10 years from now and focus on the things that will get you there. Strip out the rest, but keep the things you are passionate about even if they don't have much practical value.
But you cannot be sure you can recover your data (you can be sure in theory only).

In practice, you don't know if you can recover your data unless you migrate the whole company to the backup copy and ask them to check every functionality they use -- every time you make a copy (and rely on them doing 100% coverage). The best you can have during the normal operation is a high probability that what you get is a proper backup, because that would be the case the last time you did a full test (if you ever did). Datasets change, ways of interfacing with data change, etc. Testing is not perfect either, because your tests can be broken or can be reporting false positives.

So yeah... noone can be sure they can recover the data. Does that mean that noone really has a backup?
It's definitely something they're aware of. I know because I personally asked some of their developer advocates what their strategy was at their developer meeting in Munich, and followed up elsewhere.

I didn't get an answer, but they're not stupid, it has to be something they're thinking about. Now, let's just hope they don't screw it up.
That's really a bummer... I loved being able to fork a ruby lib, make some changes and have the gem available for any servers I used...

You still can. See: http://litanyagainstfear.com/blog/2009/10/09/on-gem-forking/
Von Neumann isn't exactly living. If you want to include recently dead Richard Feynman would be tops.
You sound like another one of those ever-so-charming nerds that only wants to talk about the latest academic papers at parties. Why don't you take this time to learn how to relate to other people? I wish I did when I was 18, instead of now at 26. It will make you happier and more successful in the long run.

Also, you come across as a bit of a whiner.

Work on your social intelligence. Disowning your peers in favor of books (what a timeless stereotype!) is only going to leave you emotionally crippled later on.
It does not work the way you think it does. Cells signal other cells and structures form in part based on chemical gradients. This is why animals born with extra limbs can still control them and each cell used to form a bone reacts based on the other cells around it. Consider how the body needs to supply blood the the bone marrow. Blood is entering your jawbone and exiting in separate areas. A network of capillary's deep within the bone in an unbroken chains back to your heart.
Just use Gemcutter. It's really easy. Take your existing Github project, build the gem, then gem push it to Gemcutter (assuming you have the Gemcutter gem installed). It's that easy.

If your Github project is a fork, then edit the gemspec and prepend your Github username to the gem name.. then build and push. Problems all solved :)
I wonder if the fact that the key is now detached would lead a cynical genius(tm) to believe that the key was melted after it was removed?
Ask HN: What are your failures?
If you're anything like me you will have several, so maybe just list the one you were most enthusiastic about which didn't work out the way you thought, and what you see now that you didn't then. I'll start.

I had a site called becomeatypist.com which taught people to type. I started it because I saw that thousands of people monthly were searching for 'learn to type'. This was back in the day when I was pretty much in a minority (compared to now) who knew about this thing called a keyword search tool - the original one from Goto/Overture before even Google had theirs. This is almost too embarrasing to list, but a large portion of my homepage was an image. Go ahead, laugh. Ironically, I'm almost the polar opposite with my knowledge of seo now, but at the time I was only thinking of usability from a user's perspective, which I thought was the only thing I should worry about focusing on. Before you ridicule me too much the site was mildly successful, breaking even after accounting for PPC advertising, and some weeks making me a whole $5 to $15 profit. I had customers write to me saying they found my course helpful. Unfortunately, no one ever went past the first 2 lessons out of 10 which would have meant they learned all the keys, and probably given me a renewal or two at $4.99/mo.

Things I learned: I think I did a lot of things right such as a free lead in, but many wrong. I should have done more than just try to build a functional product and wait for cash to roll in. One competitor, an ad supported (and I think distractive) free course is still near the top of Google, I think my presentation could have been way better too, but I'm a programmer not a designer. I also overestimated user attention span/determination needed to learn something new.

(maybe next time I'll tell you about passflicks.com, my DVD trading by mail and how my hopes were shattered as thorougly as my test DVDs got when mailed at a single stamp packaging cost ;)
Agreed - reading through the landing page and the overview page didn't help me - I'm still unsure what this service is all about...
I want a little flag next to the output that tells me whether the program terminates. Can't be that hard.

SCNR.
I'd be interested as well but how do you suggest we coordinate?
Because there are top-notch angels that get all the best deals with the best entrepreneurs. I guess there are plenty of other millionaires in the Valley looking for (reasonably) good investment in the tech field, but they can't write "Hackers and Painters", and they can't understand hackers that good because they made their fortune in a hedge fund. "Lack of entrepreneural ability" may actually turn to be a provincial naïvety (think of wannabe-entrepreneur from North Dakota who just came in Valley), and is not usually a sign of certain failure.

[EDIT] PG also has an essay on this somewhere.
He means simultaneously.
If I recall correctly, UTLISP on the CDC-6600 did this up to six levels. UTLISP stored 3 18-bit pointers in a 60 bit word, plus flag bits. The three pointers were called the CAR, CDR and CSR. CONS only took two arguments, but you could set the CDR using RPLACS (analogous to RPLACA and RPLACD). All 729 functions C[ADS]{1,6}R were available, but not by having 729 actual function definitions, which would have been a significant waste of address space and core in those days. The undefined function handler would check the name of the function being called and construct the definition on the fly for interpreted code, while the compiler would do something similar during compilation. This trick dates back to the 1970s or possibly even the late 60s. I think it was also used in other early Lisp implementations.
It's probably a questionable assumption that screen will be installed on the jump host. Those machines usually have pretty minimal systems.
this is an exponential change in address space, not a linear one

To be fair, Moore's Law describes an exponential change in usable address space that we're still living through.

The numbers are kind of spooky. The stupidest statement of Moore's Law is "everything doubles in size, at constant cost, every 18 months." If we take that statement literally, and also assume that the reaching of the "32-bit memory wall" became a widespread phenomenon around, say, 2009 [1], a backwards extrapolation suggests that the RAM industry should have begun in 1961 with a single byte. This is frighteningly close to agreeing with actual history. [2]

The implication is that another 32 bits only buys us another 48 years. After that we'll need a 128-bit address space in order to properly index our personal catalogues of everything ever. [3]

Or, perhaps, at some point we will just get tired of making RAM.

---

[1] This is when I first noticed it. Yeah, people with millions of dollars hit this wall in 1990. Must have been nice to be them.

You will note a certain degree of slight-of-hand in my numerology here. ;)

[2] Intel's first memory product was a 64-bit unit in 1969. In the fantasy modpunk universe where Moore's Law was operating during the Sixties, that would imply a starting point of a single bit in 1960.

If we reject my narcissistic assertion that nobody important cared about the 32-bit memory wall until this year, and instead accept oomkiller's assertion that the 32-bit memory wall first appeared on the radar around 1990, that would push back the birthday of the first bit to around 1941. I give you Wikipedia:

The [Zuse] Z3 (1941) was the first working machine featuring binary arithmetic, including floating point arithmetic and a measure of programmability. In 1998 the Z3 was proved to be Turing complete, therefore being the world's first operational computer.

Cue the Twilight Zone theme.

[3] We probably won't need that 256-bit address space in 100 years, since there are estimated to be only 2^266 atoms in the observable universe.
A few years back, I worked on some software for phones and PDAs running Palm OS. To do something as fundamental as send and receive SMSes, I had to use a completely different API on each supported device.

It was a complete nightmare and really depressing work, writing the same thing over and over again. Google really need to avoid a similar situation on Android.
+1. I had to go to SeleniumHQ's site to get what saucelabs does.
I'm not sure how much of it is lack of financial education, and how much is a combination of peer pressure and general attitude in the nation. When everyone around you living off the debt, when "whole America is living in credit" is a popular truism, when banks pushing the cards and credits down and market them aggressively, it is easy to lure self into thinking that it's actually normal and how life is supposed to be. Because those banks wouldn't be throwing money at you if they knew it's wrong, and all those people with heavy mortgages and debts can't be wrong, right?
They could display a flag if the program HAS terminated, but there's no way to determine is a program will terminate.
My personal biggest failure is not doing the wrong thing or doing it wrong, but simply getting the timing wrong.

That seems to be the story of my life so far.
I would love to see the same kind of list, but for fiction books. I can't think of any fiction right now that have a clear connection to the spirit of entrepreneurship, but I'm fairly sure there must be. For example a book portraying determination within the central character, or overcoming great challenges.

Can anyone think of such books?
I should have pushed Apache Rivet more back when Tcl was still a reasonably popular language.
This unfortunately describes me too much. Any ideas on overcoming it (please don't say "just do it")?
The leader board now shows average karma.
But there is one potential drawback, answering 'Ask HN' style posts is a fantastic way to destroy your average, this may lead to people answering those less because they might be afraid of denting their 'average' karma.
I just afraid to take 1 year vacation. I will have a constant feeling that my business will be ruined this year...
Most people are able to act as themselves quite competently! For a TV ad featuring a person as themself the requirements are that you are that person ...
Indeed, it is a filter of sorts. It filters out the bad VCs and angels, those that wanted to make money OFF the startups in stead of together with.
Here is mine:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=737192
Spending a decade in enterprise software.
This is one of the things I did years ago that, with hindsight, could have been so much more.

I started up a website on the urging of some people from one of my Usenet hangouts nearly 10 years ago. It was specifically about demystifying university entrance interviews (and exams where applicable) at Oxbridge, something nobody else did at the time. It was as successful as I could hope, at the time; plenty of people visited and contributed their experiences, we got written up in the national press, we even had takedown requests from certain colleges.

My failure/regret is dropping it instead of growing it. It was partly because the tech running the site was terribly outdated (initially it ran in ASP on an Access database. Really) and although I'd converted it to PHP it was still the ugliest code I've ever written. (In my defence it was my first 'big' webapp type project.) As a result of this crazy spaghetti monster of code and associated bad practices, at one point I lost the live database and just... never got around to restoring an old backup.

Looking back, the site could have grown massively. There was a clear demand and we were ticking nice boxes such as university access for all, state school equality, etc. We could have expanded to other universities, personal statements, traditionally difficult subjects, internship advice, graduate careers interviews, etc. We could have ridden the social wave. We could have charged. Etc.

I'm pleased with the first year or two of the site but the fact I just kind of dropped it and got on with other things still annoys me. I was incredibly strapped for time but looking back, I could have done it. Really, I hadn't figured out what I wanted from the whole thing. I just thought it was cool that I'd made a website and got people I'd never met to contribute to it. Once I'd sort of achieved the 'have a website with some information on it' goal, I lost interest, and never really thought about how it could really become something big.

Someone else thought so; they bought the name (not the domain, funnily enough) when I let it expire, and copied the format - and the content, including my lame humour - word for word. They're not growing it either, but they haven't been graceful to me (basically yelling at me for letting the site die, thus irritating my own annoyance at the same) so putting my hat in with theirs to take the site places isn't really an option for me any more.
Yes of course, but I like having the fact that it's done automatically on push... And I don't really like having to go back through my projects to change the gem dependencies...
Money or Meaning: Spending Our Wealth of Time
"If you can't figure out how to organize your material, try this: Write down ideas in random order, then sort them".

I wish they taught me to do this before the 5-paragraph essay format. The latter of which is a useless exercise that has almost no application in real-life writing.
Was skeptical of OpenID. Tried it for the first time yesterday to log into to answers.onstartups.com.

I'm a believer.

I used MyOpenID instead of google/yahoo etc since after reading the article about the power of google passwd that was posted here, since I expect MyOpenID to be primarily for trivial logins.
Because of the way it's held, and because the keys are tapped, it reminds me of the Chapman Stick: http://stick.com/ , which, beyond being an instrument in its own right, was used as the baliset in Dune.
Ask HN: Joining a team later as a co-founder
Has anyone here joined a team as a co-founder, even after the initial team already started and incorporated? What are your red flags if you're approached with such an opportunity?

It's one thing being with your friends from the beginning of a project, but getting pitched an idea and then offered to become a co-founder can be shaky.

Is an even split still expected?
please don't say "just do it"

Okay. Read another book! ;)

(I wonder if I still have Matt Groening's Life in Hell cartoon about grad school, in which he describes this sentence as an all-purpose recipe for avoiding working on your thesis.)
You have just outlined the simplest, most direct way to overcome it.
Rescale your expectations/plans/schedule such that shipping is easier than not shipping.

My business started with an 8 day deadline, largely because I thought if it was longer it would end like all of my other private projects, with several months spent on research, filling out notebooks, and grand plans followed by a failure to follow through. I figured if it was just 8 days that it would be easier to finish rather than telling Dad et al "Yep, that ended up not going anywhere".

Three years later...
The road to hell is paved with good intentions?
This can also backfire. I have a friend who hired a very well known developer to work on their startup in large part for PR reasons. The product had already been developed and was doing well, but he wanted to expand his team and gain more mindshare in the developer community.

Long story short, when things went south, this "A-list blogger" took all the credit for the companies success, and made a big stink about it, airing his dirty laundry in public, which was all anyone ever heard about it because he had a legion of screaming fanboys to spread the dirt even though not one of them had the slightest clue what really happened.
'Me'