skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many years ago I had the choice between staying with a successful company I helped start where I had little control over the overall technical direction and joing a very risky venture which gave me enormous freedom including the opportunity to immediately hire several friends from college, all of whom were very smart but without much work experience.

I choose the latter which turned out to be a big mistake. Not only did I walk away from a small fortune but nothing went right at the new company.
Even though I did my best to secure everyone good offers, as a whole the team was unable to work together. Everything fell apart when a key partner we were counting on to raise funding instead used our ideas to help secure a management position at a competitor.

In the next company I start, I will be much more careful in who I hire and who I choose as a partner.
The fact that your counterexample doesn't work- patio11 has shown that his direct-marketing type sales letter gets more conversions with each additional 'above the fold' actionable element.

It's also an unusual onus to expect him to update his past writings when future evidence that isn't his to display suggests anything other than what he has found.
Video: The Art of Building a Startup From Nothing
Thanks for the links, it's definitely a hard problem, but as you pointed out, it's a bit easier when you're focused on products which often have landing pages (on say amazon or ebay) with lots of highly structured data. I think google squared is cool but probably not useful to a web retailer because there is no API (that I can find) and no guarantee of good coverage for a given catalog.
So why this instead of an existing load balancer?
Also it assumes that it is not necessarily people who are prone to be greedy, but that the community rules makes them behave in specific patterns that hardly come as a surprise, once you see the benefit structure.

Just watch any infant and you will have empirical evidence that the natural state of a human being is greed. It's societal rules that limit that greed but assuming it can eliminate it is foolish and ignores reality. As several others have mentioned Capitalism recognizes that people are greedy and accounts for it in the economic model.
A wage from what? I said prefunding :-)

You're right though, I probably should have said 'prewage' :-p
In the discussion of sudo -- having "PASSWD: ALL, NOPASSWD: /bin/dd" is effectively "NOPASSWD: ALL". The legitimate user will have to enter his password for other commands in a semblance of security, but an attacker who compromised his account can bypass that. Consider the following (with /sbin/route also in NOPASSWD):

sudo /bin/dd if=/path/to/anything of=/sbin/route
sudo /sbin/route # pwned!

So I can now run ANY program without a password. If you like, throw in a few more dd commands to backup/restore the abused command (route).

He also has /sbin/insmod in NOPASSWD, which is another "get out of jail free" card. If I can load a kernel module, I can do anything.
reminded me of the line in "Roxanne":

"Oh, ho, ho, irony! Oh, no, no, we don't get that here. See, uh, people ski topless here while smoking dope, so irony's not really a, a high priority. We haven't had any irony here since about, uh, '83, when I was the only practitioner of it. And I stopped because I was tired of being stared at. "
I recently saw an angel investors club in Austin Tx give a talk. They require a fee of $500 to give a pitch, but the attitude of the angels was much more offensive to me than charging startups to pitch.

This is how they said it works: Every few months they hear 5-minute pitches from 40 or so companies, and narrow it down to 5 on a whim. Those 5 get to come back and give 1/2 hour pitches, and then they pick 1-2. They told us not to worry if we don't make the top 5 since they don't really think that hard about who should make the top 5 anyway.

What's funny is that their investment size is typically around $100k. If they make $500 each from 40 pitches, that's $20k, or 20% of their investment.

These guys were all the same kinds of guys who were bullies in high school, and this is just a way that they can keep bullying nerds. They're not really really trying to make tons of money off of these fees though. Keep in mind, in their world, everything costs a lot. It costs them $20k per year to join the country club, etc., so they just expect that people should always pay a lot of money to impress other people. Their angel investor club probably spends as much money on parties and other stupid shit as they do on actual investments.

Anyway, to me, the biggest turnoff was not the actual fee, but the whole process used by this particular angel organization.
It seems something might be buggy. Mine has been going down since new feature was posted (as I recall it was 5.71 a couple days ago, now 5.35) though my average is well above that during that time.
"You'll be disabused of this implicit notion that you are always right at some point."

Please tell me where I have ever said or implied that I was always right, or even right most of the time.

EDIT: I see you edited your post to say this twice, I suppose on the principle that "what I say three times is true".

"No offense, but your personality leaves a bad taste in my mouth, acidic, like a pasta sauce that hasn't been cooked long enough."

I will freely admit that I can be unpleasant at times, but I do know enough social skills to not insult random strangers who I have no reason to be hostile to.

"You ask for advice with no intent on taking it, instead hosting a pity-party where other nerds stroke your ego by telling you that the world has wronged you, reinforcing your broken worldview."

Wait, what? Look at the top-ranked comments on this thread, none of them could be remotely described as pitying me. Some people did give good advice, eg., lionhearted, zaidf, btilly.
The 2.4 version that is due to be released shortly is an updated version of the 2.3 branch which is stable. The 3.x is a complete rewrite is likely to be less stable. I haven't used 3.x for a project yet, but it does look interesting.

Here is a good discussion on the subject: http://forum.kohanaphp.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=3477...
VCs

rimshot
The title and post implied that we probably often overthink/plan things, and we should jump in and start implementing (earlier). According to the quote (if Tesla was right), even such an immensely successful person as Edison tended to plan/learn too little. Which means that probably we plan too little as well, not too much, assuming that we<=Edison. It's a counterpoint in this sense.

Also I think it is only a typo, but "WorsT is better" made me smile ...
The problem isn't learning things, I love that. The problem is when you want to do something, and you keep thinking that learning a little more will help you get it done, then you never get to "getting it done" because there is always more you can learn.
So many people hear things similar to this, nod in agreement and then proceed to make the same mistake! I don't get it. Somehow they think what they are doing is not the same thing. I guess this is the reason most good advice have no positive impact.
PHP Podcasts
Too bad they didn't teach him not to put annoying "Someone has just viewed <article>" pop-ups you cannot disable on his website.
Like the dating market, there's a chicken-and-egg problem, here. You might start out by aggregating other job boards' information (if you present the same stuff in a more usable format, you'll get traffic). You could offer companies a money-back guarantee for posting jobs -- or just offer to not bill them for the first three months, and then to bill them only if they got at least one qualified applicant per week (or whatever). Make sure that's a limited-time offer, though, and don't publicize it unless you have to.

Most people don't like recruiters, but recruiters do tend to look for new places to post job ads -- especially if they know they won't have much competition. If you can contact a few recruiters in your field of interest and get them to play around with your service, you'll probably get somewhere.

After that, it's a tough slog. Job boards in general are not all that good at SEO; if a search for X jobs in the Y industry near Z-ville lands a user at an even slightly relevant page, you're doing your job.

(Helping new sites get the attention they deserve is my more-than-full-time job, and I love talking shop -- so feel free to send me an email; the address is in the profile.)
It seems obvious to me that Murdoch et al. want to stay in the Web and be paid rather than de-index and disappear. Given that, these "just use robots.txt" articles seem just as disingenuous as the original statements they're mocking.
Greed is pretty much inherent to human beings. Capitalism unlike any other system, actually extracts productive value from greed.

Other systems treat greed as much as a virtue or more, but provide much more harmful ways to satisfy such greed.
What's a karma assist ?
I think the point is that like mysqlproxy, it does (or will) understand the protocol enough to do some intelligent rewriting, smart health checks, etc.
Nontrepreneurs
as for 1., I agree and disagree. Physically, it will never be better than now, but emotionally, the whole experience will be better once you mature emotionally.

7. is probably the wisest item on the list. Understanding yourself, your limits, where you can push yourself productively and where you can't will pay back enormous dividends as you grow older, both in your financial, professional, and personal/emotional projects.

In general, though, I would distrust people who say childhood is for being social. Young people tend to be jerks because they haven't learned better yet. Also, when you are young, you have less choice about who you do and do not associate with. I think correctly choosing your peers is the most important part of a satisfying social life. Choose people who value the person you want to be.
Ok, go stand in front of a bus.
I recently saw a demo of a case-based reasoning system (some simple AI) that diagnosed illness based on symptoms. I have a feeling it would not have had any idea what to diagnose you with. I'm glad you found the doctor who was able to get you on a path to better health.
Right, testability doesn't necessarily mean physical measurements.
Well, you can not prove that the bus would run over him every time he tries it.
I edit in place. Bad habit for public fora. Probably would have removed the repetition with a further edit had I not been called out on it and quoted so quickly.

"Look at the top-ranked comments on this thread, none of them could be remotely described as pitying me. Some people did give good advice, eg., lionhearted, zaidf, btilly."

Some of the most highly-ranked comments here tell you to work on a project where other people can't get in the way. That's the worst advice that I see. The world has gone collaborative. Learning to be a better collaborator will yield much higher returns.

And like I said, you come across as a whiner by putting the focus on all the external causes as to why your projects didn't succeed. I've seen so many people with a thousand external excuses as to why they can't do X that it quite offends me, especially coming from someone as talented and privileged as yourself.
you should go through a list of companies with WW in them and start pitching them to buy your company + domain. Get them to do an auction to drive up the price

Weight Watchers
WW Grainger, Inc
William Wrigley Jr. Company
Watson Wyatt Worldwide
W_____ W____ _________
I should add that the ink colors I described work equally well as text colors in electronic documents.

In particular, I'll take/make notes in a layered, bulleted list / outline format. This lends itself to quickly noting items together with at least some structure, while avoiding the superfluous words needed to tie things together in a less structured format. Original notes in black. When I get some time to myself, I flesh things out in blue. Items of particular note in red.

It's very helpful to have shortcut keys for changing indent. There's no need to keep reaching for the mouse to execute those changes.
True, thanks for the advice. Sorry if I got upset, I had just finished reading some other comments which seem to say that the only things worth doing in life are getting wasted and partying and banging chicks, and that if I'm not doing those I'm wasting my time.
One big regret I have about some of my early projects was that I did not leave them online. I wrote a book price search engine when I was a few years older than you. it was actually pretty cool, but I folded the company because the competition looked pretty hot at the time.

Folding the company (or at least not working on it more) was probably the right decision. The mistake was that I took the code offline and lost it.

save every piece of code you write. If possible, put it in public. Not only does this help you if you later have an idea or opportunity that would use your old stuff, but it builds up credibility, and it helps give you an idea how far you have personally come.

So yeah, if there was one piece of advice I could send back in time to me at 18, that'd be what I'd say. Make sure all the technical stuff you do is accessible online forever, even if it no longer works.

Seriously, the social bullshit works itself out once you figure out that you get to choose your peers. (and you do. It's hard to imagine after going to high school and being forced to choose from the thousand or so people your age who happen to live within a few miles of where you are born, but as an adult, you absolutely get to choose your peer group and your culture. no matter how weird you are, there are other people like you.)
Very good. The 25->8 word exercise was a good little demo.

Though I smiled when I saw "if you can spell ... int main(int argc; char* argv[]);" -- his first semicolon should be a comma in C. Also: the world is (more or less) spherical, not round. :-)
Please don't take Michael Moore too seriously. He is an entertainer, just like Rush on the right. The difference is that Michael Moore has talent. With Roger and Me, he invented a new style of documentary filmmaking.

Go see the movie if you want; you will be entertained. There isn't much to discuss here though. Yes, Moore is a hypocrite. Yes, capitalism is the best thing we have. It's still healthy to raise awareness of some of the worst excesses of capitalism.
Hey Media Company, Buy BNO News. Now. Really.
Article that coined the term AJAX
They should have taught him to use a bearable font on his blog..

And is that Comic Sans in his unsuccessfully comical starting picture?
Very interesting, although we are (sadly) past the point where squeezing every byte you can get out of your program matters.
The existence of the concept of truth cannot be tested. It must be assumed. It is axiomatic to our thought processes.
I am working on a location based services app...What are you exactly looking for
Specifying Systems [book]
You was downmoded, but I think you are right. From the article:

"go to Google News, or type a newsy topic like "Obama wins Nobel" into Google's search box. What do you get? Headlines and very brief teasers linking to news stories from news sites. If you click on them, you are taken to that news site, where you can read the story, which is surrounded by that site's ads. What, exactly, did Google steal in this scenario?"

What exactly did Google steal? Very exactly, Google steal "Headlines and very brief teasers". From the perspective of copyright law, yes, it can be classified as quoting, so they can't sue google, but those "headlines and teasers" do carry news value and in some cases took large amount of resources to produce. Now, Google took it and provided link as a payoff. Is that payoff adequate? Murdoch and many news producers don't think so.

Of course, teoretically you can use robots.txt. But in reality you can't, since your competition is also indexed, so you have to play by Google rules, even if you believe they didn't pay you enough for the value they are taking.
Is there a reason the variables in the first example are titled 'x1' through 'x13'? Seems strange and undesirable compared even pseudo-meaning variable names. As another post mentioned, sample code lives forever but this particular coding style isn't what I would to see sticking around.
Massive data failure leads to loss of Sidekick users' personal data
Think about this every day:

"The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me." ~ Ayn Rand

If you aren’t comfortable with this attitude, it’s hard to be awesome. Sorry. You can be good enough without being assertive, but to a large extent, being awesome requires that you initiate, take action, and chart your own course through the norms of mediocrity.

It may sound crazy, but I feel bad when getting what I want hurts other people. Research into things like the Ultimatum Game paints the picture that humans care about fairness as well as personal gain.

I stopped reading after the requirement that I subscribe to an antisocial and amoral philosophy in order to be awesome. I'll find some other way.
Re-read the original commenter once you realize he was talking about information-per-word, not total information content.
Does Arrington ever cite sources or quote people or name names? "I talked to some people that said some stuff." Wow, how valuable. I have interesting conversations with The Voices in my head too, but I don't write about it...

Some thoughts: Desktop software suffers from this problem, everyone's configuration is slightly different. You just have to test the cases, or simply say, "this software doesn't work on your phone". (If the software is Free, then this isn't a problem, as an interested user can just fix it himself. This isn't even a possibility on Apple's stack.) Video game developers somehow manage to make their software work on PS3s, Xbox 360s, OS X, and Windows... and phone developers are complaining that they can't support both Android 1.5 and Android 1.6? Wow, OK. This might indicate code that is too low-level; Android's own API is not enough of an abstraction layer for the average use case. (Wouldn't it be nice to write apps once and have them work on every phone platform?)

I have not done any significant Android development, but so far, everything has worked as expected. The simulator works like my phone. As a user, all of the apps I've installed (via the Market or otherwise) have worked just fine.

So I think problems here might be overstated, except for one -- there is no money in writing mass-market mobile phone apps. (Thank Apple for that one.)
It would have been brilliant if he could have reduced the program size to 42 bytes - the same as the result when you run it, and the answer to everything.
"it's destruction" = "it is destruction"

"its destruction" = "the destruction of it"
Having learned English as a second language, I actually pronounced it "Wedness day" for some time before finding out how it was supposed to be pronounced... I think. That was a while ago.

Perhaps that's why many foreigners write much better English than natives: they don't get to find out the pronunciation before they see the word in writing.
In verbose form, it's almost like letting your thoughts spew onto the page directly. With taut writing, a lot of that mental clarification is done in your head before it hits the page.
I used to think like you, until I started working with some brilliant people who can't spell, or produce grammatically correct writing, to save their life. Be careful with that indicator... it's far from a surefire signal.
And what about qualia?
It's good that you want to be his friend, since he's looking for someone to buy his new HDTV and his other friends are all tapped out!
I don't really understand why this got 100 points. It's a passably good presentation, at least for the first half, but serving it out as a pdf was silly (why not just upload it to slideshare if you must share it in slide form?) and it really degenerated into randomness as it progressed.

It's alright, but not good enough to deserve top spot on HN for hours. Maybe it's just a really slow news day for HN.
You didn't answer my questions. Specifically, was the violent resistance justified in WWII?

It is easy for someone to be a pacifist when they don't worry about violence on a daily basis because the most powerful military in the world protects them.

"If the choice is between cowardice and violence, I advice violence" - Gandhi
Very similar to Brian Garner's writings and his push to simplify legal writing. He recommends four stages of writing:

Madman - put ideas on paper with no regard for formalities

Architect - organize ideas into a a rough outline

Carpenter - "build" according to the architect's specifications, still with little regard for word choice or grammar

Judge - edit carefully for word choice, syntax, and grammar
If this is true, then you should really publicly out them. I don't get why on earth you would "protect the innocent". If we're all in this together, then we need to alert each other - as loudly as we can - when we see things that aren't right.
Well, I have two kids, and my experiences with them don't really support your point. Neither do other infants I know. Infants can be very energetic in pursuit of their desires, but I don't think "greed" describes it properly.

Motives which are at work are rather: hunger, thirst, curiosity, love, desire for attention, pain, fear. Probably others. Simple ones, but not that simple as just greed.
AP doesn't compete with Google, they don't run ads. The newspapers do - if the newspapers were to all disappear but AP survived that might be good for an online source of news and ads?
:) It was a typo.

We can agree to disagree re. Tesla. We have no authoritative insight regarding his "over thinking", but my gut feeling is that the wheels were constantly spinning in his brain.
Giving up too early. Thrice.

Next time around I am going to ride it out for as long as possible.
If you use robots.txt and shut out Google, your news source will fade into obscurity. This is obvious. The conclusion, however, is that by indexing their news sites Google is providing the news sites a service, so if anyone should be paying it's Murdoch.
And as I said in my original comment, you can't rely on user education. If we've learned anything about the psychology of phishing, it's that.
Biotecture.
This must be how Douglas Adams felt when people would come up to him and ask why he'd chosen "forty-two".

Okay, let me see what I can do with this one. You score one karma assist when a given user upvotes your comment immediately before or after upvoting a comment higher up on the same branch. The idea is that you can help other comments rise in prominence by adding your comment to them, thereby increasing their value. Thus, if someone upvotes your comment above and upvotes this comment at the same time, I get a Karma Assist.

Naturally, you can't Assist your own comment, because everyone knows that's a sin.

But I worry that this definition still isn't arbitrary enough. You actually might be able to compute this with an algorithm, which ruins the humor value. If the jokey analogy to NBA assists is going to hold up, Karma Assists need to be both poorly defined and arbitrated by bored human minions with a serious conflict of interest:

http://deadspin.com/5345287/the-confessions-of-an-nba-scorek...
"Paying for the privilige to be funded" sounded to me a bit like the "own your own business" scams which Brian Dunning describes on his Skeptoid podcast/blog. see http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4095
Well, i think we could do a better job of protecting government from corruption than we currently do. It would make a big difference if we had, for instance, publicly funded elections.
First thing I noticed too. The sudo maintainers should modify visudo to do some checking for known "safe" apps versus "unsafe" apps.
text-only version: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/142733/Text/on_writing.html
(Also posted in another thread) This sounds a bit like the "Own your own business" scams. http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4095