skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Probably explains why a large number of coder only startups fail due to lack of customers...

Was your statement, and it was only reasonable that you were asked to back that up. If you then say 'there is no data either way' then I'm wondering what you base your judgement on.

I've seen several 'coder only' start-ups go to very great heights so naturally I was curious if there would be some common element in those start-ups that you knew about that would differentiate them from the ones that I know about.

Business types in general are good at running a business from a management perspective, making sure that people perform at or near their potential. That in itself is a very worthwhile skill and it is an essential component, usually closely related to having people skills.

But those same people would be completely lost when it came to solving - relatively simple - technical issues.

Since you are posting this on a form where the majority of the start-ups that get looked at and launched are of a very technical nature that was the context you made your remark in, to now extend that to 'the whole world' broadens the scope considerably, but I think that it still doesn't change the nature of your argument, and so far there is not much to substantiate it.

Problem solving is a universal capability, it means that when presented with an obstacle you will find your way around, under, over or through it.

Business people have this but their 'talent' may be limited to doing that in a non-technical way. Most coders I know can apply that talent to all kinds of problems, including business ones.

That is why I think that a group of coders stands a much better chance of getting a company off the ground than a group of 'just' business people.
Twitter List iPhone Apps
I wonder what the guy does if his car keys are still in his pocket when he reaches the checkpoint.
Is DCMA a Scam?
Well, the hour is measured, not theoretical. I have done it myself on about 14 of the computers here.

The price I pay for the hardware is actually $300 retail quantity one, and the displays are about $200 each. I said $500 in case you want more beef in the system, say quad cores or such--I use dual. I load these up with ubuntu and off we go. I would rather spend larger dollars on the chairs (not a joel joke).

I order from tiger direct and have it the next day.

EDIT: I understand your point about giving them macs instead of windows. My situation is not web-based, so we are developing for linux servers.
I don't see a way to improve this situation. However I can draw a parallel with console market. In order to publish a game for a console, there is bar to entry on SDK price alone and then there is an approval process. If approval process is relaxed, there is a "Seal of quality" attached from the console manufacturer for good content, and people are somewhat educated to look out for that kind of content.

Apple couldn't charge for SDK at this stage, and if they did it would have to be something like XNA Creators Club. They could streamline/relax approval process and introduce Seal of quality type of content approval where applications longing for that status would go through a more rigorous process. Kind of like Microsoft has for Windows applications (I forgot the naming for those kind of apps).
On top of compilation speed, Go also has CSP style support for concurrency built in, which is something that C++ will only ever have bolted on.
Trillionth Tonne
Here's a tip I picked up from them: if you can mail every few days instead of every day, you can get a nice break on your rate. I know you gaurantee a 24 hour turnaround now, but something to consider.

That should be considered into the business model, example: 24-hour guaranteed: $3, 2-3 day delivery: $2, 3-5 days delivery: $1. Then you could have different queues/printers for each option.

If you start growing, you could set up different locations to print closer to the destination and you could have a really cool service like: 2-3 hrs delivery guaranteed!

Also, you could outsource the printing and delivery, say high school/college kids who want to make some extra money, they sign up at your website and start receiving correspondence to print and deliver close to where they live. For each delivery they accumulate a certain amount of money and you send them a check at the end of the month if they have achieved a certain threshold.

Btw, congrats and keep at it, try your best and you'll do great!
Well there are two basic reasons tech startups fails technology failure and business failure. I assumed it was self-evident that a lot of tech start-ups fail on the business side (both those founders by coders and those founded by business people). Look at the list of YC company failures, they're almost all business failures rather than technical failures.
Ask HN: Anybody got spam to your 37signals' Writeboard/Backpack mail address?
Yesterday, I got 2 spam mails for "PDF Reader 2009" to two seperate email addresses I exclusively used for Writeboard and Backpack (writeboard@... and backpack@...) announcement lists from 37signals.<p>Anybody else got these?
I think it's just an ad. It replaced the Co2Stats banner. If Mixpanel or google analytics were being used, I would have seen the inserted javascript. At least not client side.
I am mystified that companies use interviews in hiring despite the overwhelming academic evidence that interviewing does not work,

I conjecture that what we are discussing is primate social behavior (yes, "monkeys in a tree") and social hierarchy in action. Of course we _are_ primates, so maybe it _is_ vital that Google hire enough "alpha males" or whatever.
Indeed. Rob Pike makes a point of the 120kloc RTL compiling in 8 seconds in his presentation video, but the Delphi RTL on my machine right here compiles in about 11 seconds, and it has over 417kloc - and much (~ 2 to 3 seconds) of that time is in linking together a runtime package, for folks who want a dynamically linked RTL, rather than statically linked.
I would suggest you seek out a good partner that balances your strengths and weaknesses.

I have read something (don't recall what or where) that talked about people who were failures until they found the right partner -- like song writers that could do one part of it but not all of it and didn't get successful until they found a partner that was really good at the part they couldn't do but who couldn't do the piece they could do. (I think this is the story behind Gilbert and Sullivan.) So I would suggest you first look for information on how to find a compatible partner and then later go find that partner.
The Delphi community is small but vocal. It may just be that you don't notice them if you're not looking for them!
Also called Persistent Identification Elements. Bad mojo, those.
Apart from the arithmetic fail, I think she did more than well in the creative/copy part. In fact, I think she did more than well. She recognized the brand value, put the story edit in line with the brand/tagline and made a plausible copy on the spot in a situation that is far from normal for that kind of work. All in all, it depends for what she was interviewed for, but then again Google is not good at/famous for copywriting/advertising - they are a technical analysis company, not a creative one.
a mountain cabin off the grid is a pretty good start

And then came Google Earth...
Mr. Biver says “People want exclusivity, so you must always keep the customer hungry and frustrated.”

I agree when it comes to tangible goods (Think Apple, Nintendo Wii early on), but I don't believe I have ever seen this work for virtual products.

Agree? Disagree?
jacquesm: Could you please comment more on the inaccuracies you notice from Google Analytics?
ALGOL invented most of the things you see in today's code. Loops, subroutines, and I believe dynamic allocation all came from ALGOL.

And the reality is that these things haven't really changed much. Most of the changes that modern languages bring are in the way of directives to the compiler/interpreter.
When Rails Fails, Follow-up
alias playFlash='chmod 777 ~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/\#SharedObjects'

alias clearFlash='rm -rf ~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/\#SharedObjects/*'

alias stopFlash='chmod 555 ~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/\#SharedObjects'
Pitch Yourself, Not Your Idea
Let me say this... there's a reason why ALGOL 68 is no longer used very much. At the time it was criticized for being horrendously complex, and there is some truth to this.

Notice that the email points out all the different things you can do with ALGOL 68 compared to Go. If we were to compare all programming languages this way, wouldn't C++ be the best language ever?
You mean programmers in 1968? Of course.
This reminds me of that south park episode with underpants gnomes:

1) Collect underpants
2) ?
3) Profit

http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/8608/Startup-Lessons-Fr...
Teaching the market a lesson
Twitpitch: That Failed Idea
The Next Big Trend? It's All About Curation
The Economics of Abundance
The Rise of the 'Homepreneur'
But the set of all other similar celebs potentially had the same opportunity but didn't take it.
How to Not Go Out of Business
Well, I also have it remember my decision, so I'm not prompted that frequently.
How Grandmas May Play Favorites
I'm turning into a Lisp snob
You must have missed this report on Facebook:

http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2008/09/02/facebook-selling-digita...
I have no sympathy for you after viewing your site. It's these kind of sites that create higher click prices for legitimate retailers.
Ok, but I'd take it as read that YC brings a bit of business acumen to the table.

I think a better conclusion to draw from that is that start-ups fail in large numbers, period.

The fact that they crash mostly for business reasons doesn't mean that those companies don't have business people associated with it. It simply means that running a start-up is hard, that your chances of success are small and that the business part of it is one of the hardest parts.

If the co-founders get everything right, but screw up the business bit then they don't stand a chance. But whether or not they have a business background hardly matters since almost all start-ups will have someone in the background with that expertise.

The bigger problem is that bad ideas get funded just as often (or even more often) as good ideas. And that good ideas will identify themselves in a really simple way, they get off the ground with relatively little effort in the business department, there is time enough to take a 'business guy' on board after you've become somewhat successful.

Google is a nice example of that.
Never said to the contrary, but skills can be acquired, and roasting is one of the easier ones to work on.
Mixpanel has an API where you can have the server provided data without needing the client to cooperate by executing your Javascript. Aside from the obvious accuracy issues this addresses (particular for technical audience who disable things by default), I find it is much easier to do more sophisticated action tracking on the server side rather than having to abuse GA to do it via setting Javascript variables and praying it actually works for a change.
Exactly. And by failing (even a couple of times) you are going to learn more about how to run a business (or not) than by getting an MBA.

It takes a lot of stamina, guts and willpower to get to stage one to begin with.

After you've been part of that a few times it gets easier to spot problem areas before they become lethal.

Another thing that really helps is to observe how others fare and to observe closely if they succeed, and closer if they fail, just to make sure that that particular mistake isn't one you're going to repeat (don't worry, you'll have a wide range of original ones to choose from).
Dreamhost has used something like this for a while now. It works well, I feel.
No, C++ lacks many things ... that's why I personally hate it ... the cost you pay for the feature creep is not worth it.

A good language is not a revolutionary one, indeed, but it's kind of depressing that the state of the art is the same as 30-40 years ago, and it sometimes seems that language-designers haven't learned anything.

There's nothing I hate more about a programming language than exceptions to rules. And Go has plenty of those. I understand the pragmatism, but if some people are unhappy with C++ or Java, why make the same mistakes when designing a new one?
That's a very interesting observation. What do you mean by virtual products, "media"? Many people cultivate a taste for obscure food, music, movies, and literature. Surely some of the appeal of these obscure bands or movies has to do with the exclusive feeling one gets by belonging to the minority of people that know about them. There's also a need to always search out new and different things to stay ahead of the majority when the obscure is "discovered" and becomes mainstream. Undoubtedly the market for art (paintings sculptures) provides an example of a virtual good that can fetch a huge price at auctions. Although by the time rich people "discover" an artist and start bidding millions for their work, all of the true artistic innovators have moved on to something different. So it actually appears that there is a transition - knowledge provides the exclusitivity in virtual goods for the artists while money and the ability to sustain bidding wars provides the exclusivity for those who don't have knowledge. There is a cyclical behavior also - every harvest a very tiny minority of obscure virtual goods are randomly chosen for mainstream success - their prices are amplified by bidding wars among non-artists, while all other members of their crop are left for dead.
Pythagoras
If I take my log files and put them side-by-side with google analytics after synchronizing the clocks (analytics switches days at 9am in the morning here) I am sometimes off by as much as 100%.

It's been bugging me for the longest time and I can't find a conclusive cause for the discrepancy. More interesting is that when I put the analytics numbers next to the adsense numbers and the log files is that the adsense numbers (pageviews) tend to be more accurate than the analytics numbers.

For performance reasons the analytics tags are at the end of the page, the only plausible explanation I can find for all this is that users click links so fast that they never wait for the page to load fully before they move on.

Because the ad tags are higher up in the page and therefore load earlier that just might explain part of the gap.

But definitely not all of it.
Congragulations
Researcher busts into Twitter via SSL reneg hole
No...

But it can certainly find a place next to it. (A small place, think Primer vs. Transformers 2: Revenge of The Fallen.) There will always be a place for indie art, just as there will always be a much larger place for Dancing With the Stars or endless Pirates of The Caribbean sequels (which I enjoy, btw).
The co2stats banner is still there (the green thingy on the left).

Mixpanel could simply use the data tracked from the image, if you view the page source you'll see that it is loaded from their servers.

There are some limitations to capturing data like that though (and some advantages too).

I'm starting to wonder now if HN actually used analytics or if I'm hallucinating. I'm pretty sure I saw that tag at some point... Alzheimers...
"A good language is not a revolutionary one, indeed, but it's kind of depressing that the state of the art is the same as 30-40 years ago, and it sometimes seems that language-designers haven't learned anything."

I think it's just a sign that computer science is a maturing field. After all, I don't hear civil engineers complaining that the fundamental concepts of building a bridge haven't changed much in the last ~2000 years.
Personally I think delphi will always be one of the most undervalued platforms of all time. Good IDE, lightning fast, lots of libraries. In many ways it was way ahead of its time.

It's also an excellent example of product quality not being the metric by which success will be determined.

Unfortunately.
Ask HN: KillerStartups.com?
Hi, HN Community,
I want to know what do you think about the KillerStartups.com? Is this a good way to feature a web startup? Would you use it yourself and why?
Also, what would you recommend to get people aware of a startup?
Thanks!
Can India take on Silicon Valley as a global R&D hub?
US Charges Madoff Programmers
WHERE TO BUY AND SELL Your GOLD
My advice is to dump the site and replace it with a clean blog. If your as busy as you need to be to survive, you'll never have time to maintain a custom site like that. Don't let your site show off your skills, let your reference-able portfolio do that job.
Who Needs Mathematicians for Math, Anyway?
No, no, no... definitely not virtual goods in the sense that you linked to... that is a whole other beast and I have been in complete awe at how much the virtual goods market has grown (first starting in the Eastern hemisphere).

Virtual goods such as web apps and services. Blogging apps, productivity apps, etc.
I was talking more of virtual apps such as blogging apps, productivity apps, etc.

But you make a fantastic point.

I just don't see this working for virtual products such as this, but it undoubtedly works with tangible goods.
From my POV, it's a sign that we are becoming more shallow.
I wish the article touched on Xbox's Community (now Indie) games. I spend more time on $1 games like I Made a Game With Zombies, Jump!, Johnny Platform's Biscuit Romp and Miner Dig Deeper than I do on XBLA games like Trials HD and Geometry Wars.
Yeah, i dont hear people blaming civil engineers because all the bridges that they build collapse spontaneously or which need to be replaced every 6 months or which work only with 5 wheel cars.
'Computer Science' is going backwards fast, and we all know it.
OTOH the Go authors made it clear that it's intended to replace C for the basic system programs & libs. I think that's step in the right direction.

I started to earn money using Erlang & Clojure, so looks like I'm not only fan of new exciting high-level langs but also quite an adopter of them in the so-called real world. Still there are some uses when a VM of your Chosen One language brings an unacceptable overhead. Imagine your daily work using vi, grep, find as they were compiled into jars and each running via JVM. Nightmare with that 2 seconds delay of starting each little proggy, isn't it? (Have you ever used the original Amazon's EC2 commandline tools written in Java? You'd know what I mean).

Of course it could be solved by some kind of injecting of program to be run to some VM already running, but that's not an established practice of working with basic programs in your system. At some level fast binaries are needed.

Personally I think it's a pity that some language of SML family didn't get to the mainsteam for such system programming. Haskell is fun and people write things like text editors and window managers in it; but is still perceived as too academic for real tasks which isn't completely true.
I use Hadoop with custom map/reduce apps, but I am just experimenting a little with Pig, and playing with Hive is on my to-do list. I may change my mind on this, but I find the map/reduce model to be easy to work with, and development/debugging is fairly quick and easy running a single development Hadoop node.

BTW, I don't view Hadoop as only being useful for very large datasets. It seems reasonable to build automated Hadoop processing into a new application that has smaller data size requirements. You don't give up much in performance, and the extra development time is reasonable. Then you have lots of flexibility for scaling up. Also, if you only have sporadic needs to process large data sets, using Elastic MapReduce is very cost effective.
> "Programming language quality is usually inversely proportional to the number of special forms"

Programming language obscurity is also usually inversely proportional to the number of special forms. Church numerals?

The happy place is somewhere in the middle, where there's enough language such that you don't have to build it out of other pieces - and this also helps with performance, static analysis, tooling, debugging and lots of other areas - but there isn't so much that you end up with lots of methods to do the same thing, in similar but incompatible ways.
At peak, Spain gets 53% of its energy from wind
*during high winds at 5:50am on a Sunday morning
GO SPeeDY with Chrome
It's probably the algorithm in question that's to blame, in conjunction with the slow OpenCL implementation for the 8800GT, as you found.

On my machine (I'm the article's author), even Apple's GPU-tuned version of Galaxies runs much faster on the Mac Pro's CPUs than the GPU. So, something's up. I think only the GTX285 for the Mac Pro beats out the CPUs on that test, but I could be wrong...

The 1-2 seconds of overhead could also be contributed to by the compilation of the OpenCL program for the GPU, as I do a compile of the .cl kernel on each run of the program.

Furthermore, I wasn't very scientific about the GPU case, because I wasn't planning to ship a GPU-tuned algorithm. To actually pull this off for a consumer app is easier said than done.

For instance, I'd prefer not to ship the .cl kernel in the application, and would rather provide binary-compiled kernels. Doing this for >1 flavor of GPU is nontrivial, from what I gather, as I'd have to actually own the GPUs in question to get compiles for the different targets (I could only cover the GeForce 9400M, and 8800GT from my own collection of hardware).

That said, I still want to stay open to the idea in the future as I play around with the algorithm, and understand it further.

Thanks for the nudge, though. I really should dig deeper.
Undiscovered country
You'd be surprised how big of deal GA tag placement can be. We see vastly different stats when we have them in the header vs the bottom of the page. It has something to do with previous page elements blocking the page render.

Also, you're accounting for spiders in your logs, right?
I totally agree. I don't think the flash is doing that much for you anyway.

But if you refuse, at least put something else where flash-less people see. My first impression of you was:

Alternate HTML content should be placed here.This content requires the Adobe Flash Player.Get Flash

which makes it look like you don't have the attention to detail to get rid of a stock message like that (and proves to me you didn't write it yourself).
... last weekend at 5:50am on Sunday morning. Still impressive though.
This kind of exclusivity in luxury goods is mostly about signalling social status and group membership, AFAICT. It's much harder to flamboyantly show off a virtual good, except in a virtual setting, which in turn is susceptible to gaming and cheating of all sorts, not to mention somewhat nerdy.
Impressive.

But the headline is slightly deceptive, as 53% is the maximum ever recorded.

What's more impressive is the that over the 24 hours presented the contribution from wind never drops beneath 30%.

Contrast this with the current UK renewables target of 15% by 2020 (http://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/what_we_do/uk_supply/e...)
How I Imagine Google Chrome OS
co2stats wasn't there when I wrote that.
A new build tool for Clojure abstracting away Maven/Ant
"I could show these poor imperative programmers how their problems could be solved much easier in Lisp if I wanted to." That to me (as an outsider) seems to be the main message of these Lisp blogs. But at some point, nobody will believe you could do it, unless you actually do.
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. --Antoine de Saint Exupéry
If you're browsing with Firefox, you can take control of flash cookies by installing the "Better Privacy" Add-on.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6623