skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The author seems to be in a windows environment and would probably benefit from like etexteditor which is pretty good, the thing about windows is that it seems really hard to use vim in as I'm used to going to a directory or using autocomplete to chose files from like say

vim ~/git/con\t

and getting

vim ~/git/configs/

and so on. Which seems to work much better in a nix environment.

Personally I use emacs most of the time though vim does work well for quick edits.
". On the other hand, the nostrums also touted in this article as a substitute for vaccines and antivirals, like washing your hands, have almost no scientific support in the literature for influenza."

Really? Someone should give the NIH the heads up:

http://www.flu.gov/individualfamily/prevention/index.html
Flu Home > For Individuals & Families > Prevention & Treatment

"Take these everyday steps to protect your health:
...

Wash your hands often with soap and water, especially after you cough or sneeze. Alcohol-based hand cleaners are also effective."
Influencers and Media Relations. Picked industry specific niches, and leaders, invited them to participate in our early stages (at least their opinion) and began strong networking. Day of release(s) had support from these opinion leaders and they helped promote.
Well, I've been married for five years and I'm a co-founder. I don't know if it's like this for everyone, but for us there are a lot of similarities. I think you can easily s/co-founder/wife/g on the list below.

- My co-founder very intimate knowledge about me. My credit score. My favorite things. My political positions.

- My co-founder knows me well enough to manipulate me, if he wanted to.

- My co-founder is really aware of what a rotten person I can be.

- I can talk absolutely candidly with my co-founder. About anything. Even medical stuff.

- My co-founder almost certainly knows exactly what I'm doing right now, even though he's 1000 miles away from me.
some other helpful books:

- Data Mining, by Witten and Franke; describes basics with rigor, including how to use Weka, which they wrote

http://www.amazon.com/Data-Mining-Practical-Techniques-Manag...

a couple java-based books from Manning:

- Collective Intelligence in Action (by Satnam Alag) and

- Algorithms of the Intelligen Web (Marmanis, Babenko)

-
I won't blast you, but I will disagree. Relationship problems seem to span across relationship classes, and tend to involve breakdowns in trust and communication.

It seems like trust and communication are fundamental to both romantic and cofounder relationships. Maybe you can't judge a founder after watching them try to drunkenly pick women up at a bar, but I'd be surprised if there wasn't a correlation between someone's ability to maintain successful relationships in both categories.
Well, I usually work more than 40 hrs/week on my startup because I can't stop thinking about it. But sometimes I just run out of gas and only do the bare minimum for a week or two.
The author mentions snipMate, the vim plugin for snippets. I've started to really embrace this plugin and it has made programming much more pleasant, since I only type the stuff that matters and none of the scaffold (especially in HTML)
I was hoping Joel would send around a URL for feedback. I didn't stick around to see if that ended up happening. The problem wasn't that the talks were horrible in and of themselves. But it appears that he totally underestimated some of the audience's abilities. I couldn't have been the only person there that's used ASP.NET MVC, Python, jQuery, and Ruby. For us, the talks weren't insightful because they were all introductory.

That said, I chatted with some attendees who thought the talks were great because they only program in ASP.NET (old style) and have never been exposed to these sort of languages. I guess they're the developers that ask the questions on StackOverflow and people like us are the ones answering the questions? :-) Or maybe I was just unlucky enough to know about the languages they decided to focus on. Had there been an introductory talk on Haskell or Clojure, I'd have learned something new.
Same boat. It was interesting to invite a third person into our life like that. But this is a commonplace in many professions, no? Cops, soldiers, etc.
Viaweb took over my life when we were working on it. I worked all the time I wasn't sleeping. Not because I was inefficient or thought it was the conventional thing to do (I knew practically nothing about startup conventions then) but because there was just so much work to do.

I suppose I could have worked slower and things might have turned out the same anyway. But probably not that much slower. And I certainly had no idea at the time how much margin for error I had.
there is a nice tutorial, if you are too lazy to follow the lessons just print the cheat sheet and place right near your keyboard. Vim isn't difficould but just needs some time at the beginning but ... once you get used to it you'll miss it when you can't have it :)
There are a few clips here: http://vimeo.com/album/138616
Unfortunately Store doesn't give you access to the head. Is there something I could stick in the body that would work?
One of the things EoSL emphasizes is that simple methods can often give very good results. If you have been through the first few chapters of the book, you should be able to do some cool stuff with nearest neighbors or linear classifiers. (The reality is that on most problems, fancy methods give a slight increase over simple, especially when they are implemented by someone really skilled at getting good performance out of simple methods.)

Nearest neighbors methods can be implemented in something like 3 lines, so you have no excuse!
Trip to space in aisle 4
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.

Personally I prefer the phrase "impedance mismatch".
Introduction to Randomness and Statistics
For sure. Before 'hit parades' music could sit around in a desk drawer for decades (Schubert) before being heard. Because innovation drove away audiences wanting to hear the familiar. The people who made sure that Schubert's stuff lived was other composers ... not audiences.

Software's the same ... the people who cheer great code (art, science) are people who understand it well enough to recognize great code. The opinions of peers is an important part of achievement metrics. And that artful kind of code pretty much counts for nothing by any standard 'industry' measures. But it's influential.
That's an awesome idea! I do this very often for my own ideas.
Honestly, the number of your users is directly correlated to your potential market. Patrick's bingo cards are going after a much smaller market (teachers) than Drew's online storage (everyone). Colin's online storage for technically astute paranoids is probably somewhere in the middle.

So it really doesn't matter what you do if you're not targeting your market correctly. You have to be honest with yourself and figure that out first. Blogging on your blog isn't as good as being a good member of the relevant messageboard for your particular community, for example. (At least not for your first 1,000 users.)

For us, it was cold calling on the seller side and PR on the buyer side. Turns out that the tech blogs have been much more willing to write about us than the gaming blogs. I don't get that, but hey, whatever. YMMV depending on your initial vertical.
Can anybody explain what's the most rational decision?

I believe that you should always call "steal".
On average (assuming you don't know what the other person will choose) you get more money (1.0 if you steal versus 0.5 if you split) and you can never be betrayed.

More than that: each player decides whether the other player takes any money or not. However since the players decisions are independent it doesn't make sense to say 'split'.
Except I have the options of raising funding or getting work.

I'm not objecting to tests of fitness for payment; they're just not flexible enough. I have things to offer instead of income: Savings, a superlative credit score (so I could get a loan, or even pay rent with credit cards if I had to), qualifications.

I'm straying from the original goal, though. The post was to inquire about how others deal with this issue, not fairness.
Because they get to gamble with Other People's Money.
So 250k is what constitutes 'long enough'?

Thanks for pointing out what problems the landlord has. I asked how others here cope with the problem in similar situations.
#13 My advice is generally pessimistic. Assume you won't get money, and if someone does offer you any, assume you'll never get any more.

I´m a business wannabe from Brazil and i just laugh when i read that one. Here we dont have ANY chances of getting money from VCs so when we start something new, specially with technology, we never expect to get money. Ramen profit system is not an option at poor countries, it´s the law.
Again, from krugman-talks: no-one really needs to get rid of national debt, that is what Romania did in 80s and it was the worst economic move ever. You only need to service national debt, i.e. pay off interests, and exponential growth will take care of the rest. US debt right after WW2 is still there but it is peanuts in today's numbers.
Going through all of "vimtutor" and then asking for help on the #vim channel on the freenode irc network should make learning vim as painless as possible.

There is a lot to learn, and vim certainly isn't the most intuitively designed editor on the planet; but it is one of the most powerful editors. So the work you put in to learning it will be well rewarded in productivity gains and sheer number of things that can be done in it that most other editors couldn't even dream of doing.

And once you learn it, vim is actually quite fun to use; and you might find that going back to using more traditional editors is painful, because of their inefficiency and lack of features compared to vim.
I will tell you one aspect where they're different: I can show a business partner some very evil and cut-throat side of me that I will do anything absolutely necessary to shield from my girlfriend.
From swombat's article:

One way to resolve this problem is to ask yourself what would happen if someone who just joined my application thought it’s great and wanted to invite 20 of their friends/colleagues? If you can’t provide an easy way for that person to market your application for you, you’ll lose out on your best inviters.

As a user, it really annoys me when inviting others is a hassle. Ideally the process should be almost effortless.
From my experience, there are a few things that can make your start-up take over your life: customers, investors, competition and personal drive.

Depending on your market segment, customers can be very demanding. If your web site goes down at midnight on Friday, you can't very well let it wait until Monday at 9:00 to put right, can you?

Investors have fronted you money on the expectation of explosive growth. If you don't deliver that growth, they might not be around the next time that you need cash.

In web-based businesses, speed is a major asset to keep you ahead of the competition. Hopefully, you've got a head start on the copy-cats, but there are more of them, and some of them might even be as smart as you.

Finally, there's personal drive -- as I think you've identified, start-ups do attract a certain personality type who aren't the kind to leave a job half-done and call it a day.

In closing, I would ask you a question -- you run a small business, but is it a start-up? PG has been pretty clear in many of his other essays that these two are not interchangeable. After all, the start-ups that are being discussed here are hoping not to be small businesses for long!
If you are making money from get go, paid search is not bad if you can get to a positive ROI after a little bit of messing around.

Your leverage with paid search will depend on your longterm earning per customer and your cost of customer acquisition among other factors. I would suggest you read Sean Ellis' blog. He talks a lot about customer acquisition: http://startup-marketing.com/
Same. He was definitely one of the most insightful speakers and was a great choice to close the day. Nice guy, too.
That's a lot, actually.
Yeah, stealing would be the most rational thing to do (in the strict sense, disregarding any feelings of guilt a person might have).

This game really illustrates the importance of repeated games and quid pro quo in human relationships. What makes human society function is that we can actually create binding contracts, and that we increase trust with people over time, on the basis of mutual give and take.
As the grandson of a 'slave' immigrant that was brought over to build the railroads I take great offense to your complete lack of empathy.

If they're willing to work for $8/hour here, that means things are worse for them where they are. Who are you to cast people into poverty, death, and dismay so that your economy can maintain a slightly higher salary.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=902478
if (customer_should_get_charged_00001()) {
account += 0.00001;
}

It wasn't my example to start, but I'll roll with it. The bug, of course, is that we're adding and not subtracting.

The more obvious example where somebody has 0.01 dollars and it gets put in a cents variable, turning into 0.0001 dollars, is also easily solvable with the C++ type system.
Having fun with for loops
http://boardtracker.com/
One theme in this essay is that Paul keeps drilling these concepts into founders, and almost every time the founders don't believe him. Paul then reaches the conclusion that it's probably because the founders are too optimistic. I think this bit is wrong.

It's not that we're too optimistic, it's that the process is so subtle that the English language is too coarse to describe it. For example, what exactly does it mean when someone says 95% of the VCs are incompetent? How exactly are they incompetent? To what degree and in what ways? What exactly do they do that makes them appear incompetent? If you've never talked to VCs before, reading that they're "incompetent" probably won't give you a good idea of what an average interaction with them is like.

It's sort of like describing what making love is like for the first time. Very eloquent people have written volumes on this, but it's far too subtle for a written or spoken language. Until you actually do it, you'll only have a very poor approximation in your mind of what it might be like, no matter how much you read. Startups are like that.
I wouldn't spend too much time on the world cup problem :-).

http://arxiv.org/abs/0909.4555
I'd like to (slightly) challenge #8: it seems to me that Dropbox is a counterexample. The Dropbox guys took quite a long time and their first release was quite polished. Not perfect, certainly, but way, way ahead of just minimally functional.
I'm interested. It is not in exact alignment with the project I'm working on but it is "pretty close". I've been coming at this from the publication perspective as much as the consumption and posting-comments angle and thinking in terms of a framework (on which such a thing as Greenspun describes should be a pretty simple hack). I've been thinking about monetization a little bit more broadly than just ads. Partly in response to the recent Startup-School I've most recently been working on simplifying things down to try to figure out what I can deploy very quickly (weeks).

You can find contact info for me at the bottom of pages at http://basiscraft.com

Regards,
-t
Thanks again Garry! Great photos!
Not the classic payoff matrix, right. But isn’t the end result the same? The best answer to split is steal (100% > 50%). The best answer to steal? Well, they look the same (you get 0% no matter what you pick), but you don’t know what your partner picks. And steal is the dominant strategy. So in the end you should pick steal. And that’s a classic prisoner’s dilemma. Any faults with my logic?

(This all obviously assumes that your utility is equivalent to the amount of money. It might not be. You might value not coming across as an asshole pretty high.)
The Live Music Archive is my favorite portion of the Internet Archive. Free concerts, endless variety, and a lot of diamonds in the rough:

http://www.archive.org/details/etree
I've been keenly following SpaceX for a while. They look set to get the contract to ferry crew to the ISS http://www.spacex.com/
What's your point? Does airline software have a good metric?

The main difference is that other engineering disciplines don't have to deal with the halting problem.
If you are really niche then adwords is probably the best way to go.

If you are mass market then get the blog mentions and organic SEO.
“Yeah, stealing would be the most rational thing to do.”

But only if your utility (roughly) corresponds to the money involved. The sums of money might just be big enough for that to be (roughly) true.
What are you working on? Have you decided to work in the UK/US/elsewhere?
[Ning] Virtually Goods
It's more open-ended because you can mostly make your own rules, unlike in the physical world where you have lots of predefined constraints. The resulting solution space being much bigger, you have to use your taste to narrow down to the better solutions, so of course it's more subjective.
The latest in poetry about web 2.0. A poetic look at the exchange and creation of virtual goods in a more social world.
I agree, But what if we looked at a job where productivity should be much easier to define, like a roofer.

An obvious performance metric would be "Time it takes to install a roof that will pass a quality inspection". That metric is pretty useless alone though. Can he fix a nail gun that breaks? How safe is he? Can he work as fast in cold weather? are just a few factors.

Say you could get metrics for ALL productivity factors, you still haven't taken into account personality issues that cannot be quantified.

And this is for a single person working on a measurable task with only a few tools. What chance is there for metrics to be accurate about a task that could require any number of tools, multiple correct answers, and collaboration?
I don't know if I have the time to commit to the idea but I'd be interested in hearing more. Mind if I join in on the phone conference (depending when "tomorrow morning" is)?

Email's on my profile page.
Launch in private beta and email bloggers access codes. We got 18,000 users in 4 weeks like this, not sure if it's generalizable. I wrote the details down here: http://runitback.tumblr.com/post/223371555/how-we-got-18-000...
Right now if you include underemployment you'd probably see a rate closer to 20%. Some people who are unemployed now will probably never rejoin the job market because of protracted unemployment.

There's a serious jobs problem in the United States right now and we need to take a serious look at the direction we've been heading since the 30s. I'm afraid we're going to endlessly stimulate an economy that needs to liquidate bad debt and move on. Government involvement in the economy is not costless as some people would argue and we need to face facts and start saving and producing again.

I'm afraid that instead of maybe five years of painful saving and reinvestment that the American economy won't recover for another ten years when someone gets serious and takes some of this inflation out of the system. There's a lot wrong with how Reagan was as President but his early monetary policy is one thing he got right.
FYI, the site loads with a rails error for me. Not sure if you guys are aware of this.
Ask HN: Favorite quotes from StartupSchool ?
What were your favorite quotes from Startup School ?
Ev/Biz recalling someone commenting on the early days of Twitter: "Twitter is like the Seinfeld of the Internet, a service about nothing.".
Your response is outrageous. Simply inexplicable.
The major difference is that environmental agents are generally deterministic or stochastic, i.e. obey the law of physics. On the other hand, realms with intelligent agents, such as humans, are inherently unpredictable due to their free will (which is unpredictable by definition).
Good stuff. Agree with what has been said about it looking like a domain parking page.

Thoughts:
- The simple look is very useful. List of books, search, categories. Well done.
- The feedback "tab"(?) at the side. Why not move it to the bottom right, or at the top as a menu item?
You may not always be able to execute and let the results talk, but you can always do the next best thing. If it is an external issue (e.g. adding a feature, building a product, designing an ad, etc.), do a focus group and see which yields more favorable results. Don't let the results make the decision for you, but learn what you can and maybe it will lift the stalemate.

If it is an internal issue (e.g. deciding a reimbursement schedule, valuating the company, writing the business plan, picking a bank, etc.), find a mentor who has done it before and seriously consider all of the insight they can provide.
If they split, you are best off stealing.

If they steal, you are best off stealing.
Based on the context of the article I believe the hand washing comment was made tongue-in-cheek.
The Future of Humanity [pdf]
Cookie-based Sessions in Sinatra
The purpose of this article is to teach you how to concoct the explosive digital mixture that would enable you to use cookies for sessions within your Sinatra (micro web framework) applications.
Some thoughts on Twitter vs. Facebook Status Updates
PayPal’s Fate Now Rests With Developers
He was quoting Fernando Corbato who was comparing lines of assembly to lines of PL/I in large projects. Corbato later recalls this in an article in Byte. Crobato's Law is mentioned in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_J._Corbat%C3%B3
Devon web design
Devon Web Designers Animation Technologies based in Newton Abbot offer a comprehensive web design, web development service to small businesses including hosting and search engine optimisation.
Health Benefits of Herbal Medicine