skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're right, I stopped reading at that point. My bad!
Yes, the problem really is the undefined "proportionality" clause which needs to reviewed by some body, and some broad guidelines need to be set of what isn't proportional. The vast majority of the uses are quite reasonable, but when individual councils are left to make their mind up about clauses like this, some are bound to go off the deep end when someone is on a crusade against dog poo or whatever.
#18 REALLY depends on where you live. If you're in the Valley, definitely. Everyone who is not in a startup there works at somewhere like Adobe and has 10 coworkers who previously founded a Web 2.0 social search engine for pet clothing which promptly flopped. People used to ask me "what do you have to do to become a professional poker player?" and my reply was always "quit your job." It's a lot like that with startups, and everyone within 100 miles of San Jose knows it.

If you live in Ohio, however, "I own a software company" goes a lot further. If only I were single...
first question:

Do you want to get your website translated in the near feature? *

Yes, we want to grow big

No, we're fine with just 1 language

Why are the answers so biased?
This isn't directed at the author of the top post, but _The Cartoon Guide to Statistics_ is actually pretty good. It's a quick read (cartoons, hey), but works well as a quick refresher, or would be enough of an intro to pick up terminology for more pointed questions. (It's also fairly cheap, libraries might have it, etc.)
off topic, but I'd really like to see block quotes in hacker news comments.
Start a dating service which matches you up with people purely based on what books you both read/enjoy. Dating seems to be a perennial YC favorite, maybe they would fund you.
They should print this at the top of the comments on each TechCrunch article.
I would upvote you more if I could.

There isn't an ethnic group in the U.S. that isn't an immigrant -- even our "natives" wandered across land bridges in search of something better.
As far as application of statistics to automated composition goes, definitely check out the EMI project over at UC Santa Cruz.
I don't follow you at all. If the information available to the market is provided at the point the insider executes the "sell" then it is the B trader who provides his information later, and all the B traders will tend to act nearly at once.

In the A scenario, the A traders sell immediately, and act upon receipt of the inside information, rather than react to each other, so the information is furnished to the market gradually by all A traders.

Please tell me in more detail what you think of the scenario that I posed, and how it makes the point of the article.
Not at all man. The physical environment can be much more malicious than you seem to think.

I've done some software for buses, it's toy in comparison (with planes) but you get issues with noise, power supply, vibration, temperature, light (UV killing a touch screen) and probably lots more i've never encountered. The physical world can be every bit as unpredictable as the virtual one.
Brazen Careerist’s Ryan Paugh on Authenticity and Transparency
* M.I.T.
* Stanford
* OSU (home of the Open Source Lab: http://osuosl.org/sites/osuosl.org/files/osl_datasheet.pdf)
Only the first one is a funny moment.

Paul Graham, in the middle of all the AV trouble, says "What Talks Are Really Like".

Greg McAdoo: To sell to enterprise, offer an ROI so powerful that a person who turns you down would be scared of getting fired.

Jason Fried: "Cool wears off; useful never does. You will be using Post-It notes in 20 years."

Paul Buchheit:
1) Was working at Intel, hanging out with some friends, when they started talking about the company's retirement plan. Got depressed and the incident encouraged him to move on.
2) Gets bored with something unless he's constantly releasing, and knows how to work with himself on that limitation.
3) Every company has corporate superstitions: things you have to do if you work there because they worked for the company earlier, or appeared to.

Zuckerberg:
1) "When we got money, what we decided was that the best feature we could give to people is having their friends on there." (On increasing capacity vs adding new features)
2) "Values are worthless unless they're controversial. What are you willing to give up? We give up a lot for speed [of development]" (e.g., they maintain a single code base)

Tony Hsieh: Core values should be commitable: are you willing to hire+fire based on them.
Chicks dig Knuth: http://www.bookhu.com/analyse/?ASIN=0321637135&title=The...

It would be nice if it would show the breakdown when you search an author rather than making you click again for a breakdown for each book. Having worked with Amazon's shitty API, I'm guessing that their constraints forced you to do it like that. If I were working with them again I'd ignore their API and scrape HTML instead.
Cocoa with Love: Memory and thread-safe custom property methods
Not really. I bet carbon sequestration kills a few people one of these days. What if someone pumps a lot of CO2 into a mine, and it ruptures into a small valley? CO2 is denser than air. Everything has consequences.
Estimates have it that there are about 50k people being paid to write Ruby on Rails right now, chances are that it's way higher because it starts to be the language of choice in outsource India because of the high conceptional similarity between different projects written in rails and how they help new teams get started with an existing code base.

I sure as heck can't find enough people to hire for ruby ( and even objective-j !!) jobs.

I'm not saying your figure is wrong but I think that if you actively look for a job in these languages then it's pretty simple to find one.
I believe saikat was trying to say that this essay is refreshingly substantiated.
related to the facebook florida llc quote, for those curious, are the actual papers from sunbiz http://bit.ly/1MDAnT
Meanwhile Coffee shops with wifi are full.
Gee, I think I like your list better than mine! Thank you especially for the reminder of what Greg McAdoo said; I missed capturing that one in my notes.
SO2 injection is just such a bad idea it is scary there are still people talking about it. The problem is even if you ignore the nasty side effects, as CO2 carries on rising you have to inject more and more SO2 every year to counter the increased CO2 (especially combined with SO2's much lower residence time in the atmosphere being in the range of a few days/weeks instead of CO2 being measured in centuries).

It would also tie us in - if SO2 stopped being injected into the atmosphere for any reason, all the CO2 is still there and as the SO2 washes out of the atmosphere within a few weeks, the CO2 warming would come back full force immediately - the longer SO2 had been used to offset CO2, the worse it would be.

Offsetting CO2 warming with a seperate cooling effect is risky, the real solutions are either reduction of CO2 output - and even that might not be enough for many countries/cities because of the decades of delays in any meaningful action that have been engineered since we knew what was happening - or some technology to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere.
> There's no technical reason gcc couldn't just save+restore those registers around the block, but it doesn't.

While it's not impossible to do, it makes debugging a lot harder. gdb would have a much harder job of figuring out what's going on if the code messed with ebp, since the fp location would depend on the code. Some more debug information to describe that location could solve the problem... but why create that problem in the first place.
And this blogging thing should bite the dust pretty soon too, right?
Here's a radical idea: What if there were a country who pegged it's currency not to the dollar, or to gold, but rather to oil?

An interesting idea, but would probably get awkward in the mid-to-long term. Oil is a consumable resource with a finite (and dwindling) supply. At some point in the relatively near future, the price of oil is likely to gradually become completely unhinged from its historical value (in the sense of value as wealth, not cost).

You'd get some of the same effect in a more stable manner if you instead pegged a currency by energy production capacity of an arbitrary consumable resource. For instance, something like "one zorkmid shall equal the average cost in consumed resources to produce twenty kWh of power from a power plant generating at least one gigawatt" or "one zorkmid shall equal the cost in consumed resources to drive at 50mph for one hour in a standard four-passenger vehicle".
I completely agree... using an interview format for Twitter and Facebook proved to be boring. It just wasn't the right forum for asking pointed, controversial, information-eliciting questions. Jason Fried, both Pauls, Tony Hsieh -- pretty much all the speakers -- proved that you can deliver much more valuable insight if you prep your own talk. I really would have loved it if the Twitter guys and Zuckerberg, especially, had done the same.
If wrote a new essay with the same outline as this that wasn't summarizing the founders' responses, everyone would say I'd run out of ideas and was just repeating myself.

The Super-Pattern, 2nd para needs "If 'I' wrote a new essay".
Well, the many tools for _The Elements of Computing Systems_ are written in Java, which makes it easy for people to experiment.
http://www1.idc.ac.il/tecs/software.html

So perhaps a conceivable bonus is that SICP can somehow be merged with that book.

(This is not a direct answer to your question; there's nothing wrong with Scheme; just mentioning advantages of using Clojure.)
To vim or not to vim
You are not the only one who does not understand the halting problem.

The halting problem only says you can not prove every program will (or won't) halt - the general case.

It says nothing at all about any specific case, and there are plenty of programs where you can prove they halt.

And NP just means the solution does not scale well, not that it can't be done.

And NP-complete is something else entirely. It has to do with being able to interconvert all NP-complete problems (i.e. if you solve one you solve all).

There are many NP problems that are not NP-complete. Proving any particular problem is NP-complete, and not just NP is usually a big deal, so don't just throw that term around.
You're right, I'm having to work with restrictions imposed by the Amazon API. I think I could probably tighten up the process a little more though.

I wonder how much use an author page might be - similar gender breakdown stats but for the author instead of individual books.
Yeah, that was wrong. I was trying to get some real numbers from the report, and having trouble understanding it. I am still unsure of what the real number is. For example, the Brazil number they use is 1,368, but earlier it states that there were 645 deaths with confirmed pandemic influenza.
At the beginning of section 6. Think Long Term, you say "shear stress", but I think the word you intended to use is "sheer".
I wonder if there has been any research on the relationship between book preference and attractiveness.
My favourite supposed "compiler bug": http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=11203
Almost certain Facebook didn't, especially given the insane # of people claiming to be a Facebook co-founder.

Remember, vesting is almost as important(in my book, even more) than the % equity.

Of course, you want to get both right. Just don't forget the latter.
So are you saying that running a startup is like playing the lottery?
It was a quote from the original thread.

As for your explanation, yes, that's correct. The thing that I didn't get about the way they were sparring on the list was that if there is a solution the problem might not be solved in an elegant way, but with the number of variations involved you could simply brute force it.

Then if a solution exists you'll find it, if it doesn't exist then you can report that. After all, if you say you want to put 12 variables in to 7 registers and there is no possible way then there is no possible way. If there is such a possibility the number of permutations is small enough that it could be found anyway.

GCC contributes to the problem by having some overhead that reserves registers that could be saved on the stack for the duration of this part of the computation.
"It makes sense to equally split to equally motivate though."

Yes, otherwise you have one founder with all the weight on her/his shoulders and the others can end up like employees.
It's not worth it: Result= Everyone's equity will be worth less in the end because they don't perform with the motivation of an equal team.

Also, being in that majority equity role really stinks. It's harder to take time off, people hesitate to make decisions without you...

I DONT expect work to be evenly divided tho. Just like in marriage, it is rare for a perfect 50/50 split of work. Some people are motivated to work until 4 AM each nite, and others are not. I think accepting that is important for a happy, successful partnership.
A 2% drop in world gdp would lead to at least as bad a recession (likely even worse) than the one we're in now.

And a catastrophic failure of the ocean's ecosystem would have no economic impact at all, I guess? An economic analysis can't just ignore the risks of inaction when considering the costs of proposed solutions.
It's correct as written. See sense 9 at http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/shear -- shearing stress is the stress between two blocks pressed together along a plane and moving in opposite directions parallel to that plane.

It's a very nice analogy: the startup is moving fast in one direction and the VC or whatever is moving slowly in another one.
What do you mean by "block quotes"?

You can already use "Code Mode"
to quote exactly, get things in
a different font, and formatted
exactly as you wish.

It's a fixed width font, though.
i think there are patterns for this as well. AFAIC, kevin rose has given one of the best summaries of patterns to follow for growth: http://carsonified.com/blog/web-apps/9-ways-to-take-your-sit...

the zappos talk given yesterday at startup school seems like a much longer-term solution to growth and repeat customers.
Off topic - why the Yahoo favicon?
If we can include graduate programs, NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program is about as hacker as it gets. It's a multidisciplinary program that combines engineering, art, psychology, and sociology. Dodgeball (which was acquired by Google) began as a class project there.
Yes, but why would they have to rip out a filesystem that's licensed under CDDL?

The biggest risk Apple would be exposing themselves is to "ZFS ate my data" lawsuits. I think HFS+ is much more likely to eat user data than ZFS ever will...

I would love to use ZFS, but none of my notebooks seem to like OpenSolaris very much and I am not sure if I would like to live two versions of Gnome behind my friends now that Ubuntu spoiled me.
probably has something to do with pg's sale of viaweb to yahoo
The website runs on the service formerly known as viaweb.
In a sense. It's because my site is made with Yahoo Store, and there is no obvious way to change the favicon.
Immigration is fine, as long as it's an even playing field. The problem is that immigration right now is treated as a source of cheap labor by the companies. The policy needs to be that if you come to this country, you are officially an American, and should be paid a proper wage. Instead of being forced to work 60 hours a week for $30K.

This way companies won't get to drive down salaries by just importing a bunch of Indians to work for slave wages.

Call it Patriot Wage Freedom Act. Which would make it a form of discrimination to pay less than fair wage for employees based on their immigrant status. You make it illegal for companies to pay $10/hour for a C++ developer with 10 years experience in California and you can import as many programmers as you wish.
You could probably get a ton of users by integrating with Librarything etc and offering widgets that show the gender gap of users libraries.
FP for MooTools: decorators, preconditions, currying, arity dispatch, etc...
P(winning the lottery) * winnings - (cost to play) < 0

I think this is false with startups, but the chances of succeeding are still low.
Your ads might not be well targeted enough/have low CPC rates.

Plus, your site seems to be aimed at techies. Most of us don't ever click ads so it's tough to monetize that way.

Nice blog though :-)
In conjunction with the Promises library (http://github.com/ShiftSpace/promises) you can also do things like the following:

var sum = $arity(
function(a) { return a; },
function(a, b) { return add(a, b.first()); }
);
var lazyValues = [$lazy(), $lazy(), $lazy()];
var sum = $reduce(sum, lazyValues);

lazyValues[0].setValue(10);
lazyValues[1].setValue(2);
lazyValues[2].setValue(3);

sum.value(); // 15
NASA to pay commercial firms to launch astronauts?
A/B Testing, Too Little Too Soon? [pdf]
Agreed. The complexity of the Earth's climate can't be reduced to a handful of TRUE/FALSE questions. Anything we do to attempt to manupulate it will either a) have no significant effect or b) have unpleasant, unforseen side-effects.
Not actually the Prisoners' Dilemma - the payout matrix is wrong, but close enough, and gut wrenching. From the interviews after it seems that there's some baggage from the earlier parts of the game.

Interesting to see it (or something close enough) in action.
Cursos de Telefonia
Getting users is such a topic that it is radically different from one startup to the next. Even two start-ups in the same area are likely to have very different plans for attracting and retaining users.
I wanted to give a more thorough response, I was attending a birthday party earlier.

Remove "making people have an accident" from the car analogy and it is still unethical since seat belts are proven effective. In order to make the study double blinded with a placebo control you'd have to have something of a mock seat belt that fails to restrain the occupant in a crash or an abrupt maneuver.

The flu vaccine has been proven effective as well. The flu kills approximately 36,000 Americans a year. Therefore, a study which involves a placebo flu vaccine to determine who catches the flu and who doesn't is unethical, since those that received a placebo could potentially die or become injured. It doesn't matter if the study infects the participants or if they become infected by general human contact.

You may argue that the participants fully understand their risks and therefore a trial is ethical, but that is only part of the requirement. Again, you can find it outlined in the documents mentioned above.
The line about how "it's like we're married, but we're not fucking" makes me curious about the correlations between a founder's relationship with co-founders and their relationship with romantic partners.

You might get some good insight by observing a potential co-founder's behavior toward their romantic partner, or toward potential romantic partners if they're single.
If you could flesh out your example, I could try to answer whether the $0.0001 accounting error might be catchable. Thanks!

A type system like Haskell's can guide your programming in general and leave more of your mental resources to solve the problem at hand. As an anecdote: I have found, that with some QuickCheck tests/rules and some hard thinking about the right types, I can extend my programs even when I can't concentrate 100%. (A situation that usually just gives me Segmentation Faults in C.)
Wow, somebody is going to be friendless for a very long time. But in my opinion, it's better to be betrayed than betray someone.

P.S. Please don't spoil it for those who haven't seen it yet.
Sorry, I was being too laconic for my own good. I meant, the age isn't the problem. (Even if Scheme and Python aren't old enough, Common Lisp and some version of ML might be.)

As you say, it is about the `mainstreamness' of the language.

Insert:

>> That would not be so much of a problem. [But there are other problems.]
This thread is freakin' amazing. Especially if you use the Data Voice in your head when you read it. ;)
Photos of all the Speakers from YC Startup School 2009 - Thanks YC
Digg pages rank pretty OK in Google. I got very roughly 10k hits for a site from the Digg effect, then 1.5k over the next 2 years from people who randomly found the Digg post and clicked through.

Biggest effect of all was that many blogs found my site through Digg, then linked back to it, leading to an improved ranking that brought 31k hits from Google (over 2 years).

Still all of this is peanuts and didn't amount to anything, time spent on that site was mostly good as a learning experience. It brought in less than $500 in revenue (total) over the years, despite being in a very lucrative niche (domain names) and being on Digg, Reddit and del.icio.us main pages.

Currently the site is broken and I am not maintaining it anymore, but it was a list of domain names that are expiring soon. It didn't make much revenue because right after a hit of popularity my affiliate partner cancelled their affiliate program for registering expiring domain names, and I could never find another one and could only slap AdSense there.
Many thanks for that last link.
So I guess it's a pattern in the PHP community to blog in languages you don't know. Almost like how they write code...
I was surprised, despite the laziness, that the Twitter interview was so good. Their articulation of the realization that they did NOT want to be the kings of podcasting was eye-opening to me, maybe it was old news to others.
I don't believe thats true. your messaging to users [why do you want this?] and so on are good rules that can be learnt and iterated upon other peoples experiences.
My favorite gcc trick is to compile and run the following two line, and then try to reconcile the results.

x = 7;

printf("%d %d %d",x++,++x,x++);

x = 7;

printf("%d %d %d",x++,x=2,x++);

Go ahead, try it, run it, and explain the output.
Ask HN: Getting users 
In the what startups are really like topic, a few people wanted pg to expand on this, so I figured it'd be a good standalone topic.

What was your strategy in getting the first 1,000 users?
After reading this survey, it sounds much more like a pitch-in-disguise than an actual survey for determining if you have a market, information about potential customers, etc.

If you want to advertise, advertise. If you want to get information, design a survey to get information. To me, it sounds like you're doing the former disguised as the latter. If this is not the case (and you're genuinely doing the latter), you need to spend some time talking to people/reading to learn how to design a survey that actually gets you useful information.
Maybe Debian/kFreeBSD will be a reasonable choice for you when they get ZFS support.
Bribery.

Every product launch I've been a part of has basically used some form of bribery to get users. Of course, my background is all enterprise software. We have either shown people how they are losing money by not using our product or how they will miss out on making money by not using our product. Maybe bribery is the wrong word. What's the word for bribing people with their own money?

I haven't had any "viral" products yet, so I'd personally like to hear about how that works for people :D
Let us hear how big the splash got.
Experts see rebounding economy shedding jobs