skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The business plan contains more than the idea, it should contain the planned execution. For instance, how will you promote your product? Partnerships? Media campaigns?

Of course, the business plan is just a stack of paper. You may have brilliant execution on paper, but who knows if you will be able to pull it off.

Insert mandatory quote about military planning being necessary but not surviving the first contact with the enemy
I work as a senior-level programmer/analyst for a mid-sized private university.

My workday normally starts around 7:45 AM. On a good day, I leave for home around 7 PM. Sometimes I get to leave "early" by 6 PM. I usually break for about 1 hour (or less) at lunch time.

I do not wear T-shirts or tennis shoes to work. There is one other programmer who does; his contract has not been extended past the end of this December. I do work from home, but only because I don't get all of my work done between 7:45 AM - 7 PM when I'm at the office.

I could not use an OLPC formatted with Breezy for my work. I use a 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo w/ 4GB of RAM, and I still find my computer is too slow and doesn't have enough RAM to, for example, run more than a few VMs at once.

I do often work from 2 AM - 4 AM at home when inspiration strikes and I cannot sleep. One reason for this is the lack of distractions at this time of night: my wife is in bed sleeping and there are no coworkers to stop by and try to chat.

However, I could not work from home and satisfy my job duties. There are too many times when I need to work in person with, for example, a professor having trouble with one of the programs I've written, or go to a meeting with the deans of some of the schools at my university.

I also don't have sufficient bandwidth at home to work satisfactorily. I often do tasks where I need a 100Mbit or 1000Mbit pipe to my workstation; a 10Mbit connection is not sufficient. (For this same reason, I don't sit outside on the commons and work on my laptop wirelessly.)

Because of these reasons, I have chosen not to have children at this point in time, as I don't feel I could adequately give them the time and attention they deserve. It would be really nice to take off a few months of time to spend with my wife & my family, and have my job guaranteed when I choose to return, but that is simply not an option I have.

(For the geeky amongst you, the thing I do that needs bandwidth is mostly using TNS for running PL/SQL; running TNS over a 10Mbit WAN is frustrating at best, and completely useless at worst. It is not suited towards dealing with terabyte-sized data sets.)
I agree, like the commenters, that lean vs. raising money is a false dichotomy. However, there are some valid points in this post:

- You have to be careful with product quality. In a lean startup, because you prioritize market discovery over all else, you build a culture of people used to saying "Oh, that bug only affects 1% of customers, so we can ignore it.", even after you have found your market.

- It's hard to give up steady growth to make the kind of long-investments you know you'll have to do. IMVU had a culture of running quick A/B experiments and throwing away the loser without any deep analysis. We had gotten stuck in a local maxima with stalled business growth, and it took replacement of most of the management team to fund a six-month project to rebuild our client UI from scratch. In our case, this was absolutely the right decision. Funding anything for six months straight would have been impossible with our previous "lean startup" culture.

I, too, would like to see more discussion of lean startup edge cases. There is definitely a point where you transition out of the lean startup approach and into full-scale production.

I suspect it's very similar to the game industry's preproduction vs. production distinction: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3847/beyond_scrum_lean...
Wouldn't a more true indicator of economic benefit be the per capita benefit to a countries labor force or something to that effect? If of the $80 that Apple gets from each iPod 90% of that goes into the corporate savings account that really doesn't help out a whole lot of people. On the other hand if that $4 that goes to China goes mostly to the factory workers then that helps out quite a few people.

Point being this guy is trying to say that corporate profits are equal to jobs which isn't really the case. One benefits a small group where the other benefits a wider section of society.
That sounds more like being on a bad opium trip to me than programing (not that I've ever been on an opium trip...).

I mean, sure I agree, in certain aspects of the job there is a level of concentration and 'state' that you have to maintain in your skull in order to be able to program properly.

But a certain amount of the required 'state' can be alleviated by having a pad of paper next to your desk and writing everything down. The rest of it can be dealt with by writing code that has a simple and sensible structure.

And honestly, the majority of my coding is mind-work. I don't have to sit at a computer for 5 hours to be thinking about that piece of code I'm going to write. One I have read the right documentation and I have figured out what the problem is, I normally need a bit of time for it to gel, then I type it into the machine.

I think the point of the post was that new mothers need time to bond with their infant. 'Doing marketing' for 2-3 years instead implies to me that they are working the 9-5 grind (which a programmer can theoretically avoid). Which misses the point entirely...

There's no reason you can't sit at the computer with the baby right next to you.
Ouch, pretty harsh. Any OCaml fans around want to counter some of those complaints? Are these things that don't bother most programmers, or can be avoided by proper idiomatic code?

I've heard good things about OCaml elsewhere, but my experience with functional languages is limited to a bit of Scheme and Haskell. I've thought about trying out OCaml but this makes me possibly want to reconsider...
Isn't it possible that thermometers got better after 1960, especially when measuring temperatures at "high northern latitudes"? This seems more likely than assuming that trees somehow got worse at measuring temperatures.
I must say you are most definitely the normal programmer and if that truly is your workday it is insane.
Have a look at JanRain's RPX - http://rpxnow.com. Makes it very easy to deploy OpenID and equally easy for end users to login using an OpenID, plus Facebook Connect, LiveID, Twitter, etc.
You've never looked after a baby have you? Going to work in the morning feels like going on vacation.
Some of best skeptics are scientists.

Some of best scientist are skeptic.

Skeptic and science go together in hands as brothers of gaining knowledge through doubt of knowledge.

When one or other says no to this doubt, and does not continue the knowledge they are as bad as other.

When one says no to evidence or it is another to say no to give.

These are both ignorance of transfer of knowledge. There is nothing knew of this halt in trade despite abundance. Only through doubt and then acceptance, doubt and then transfer of knowledge can both be truly the same.

With holding information neither will advance. The "high road" is not the high road, it is the only road. Only path that will take you somewhere other than already are.
I think your analogy with games and movies (and to a lesser extent drugs) is quite apt, but I'd say that the major reason why those things are expensive is that there are specific, government-enforced limitations on supply.
I don't know if it's how the phrase was originally intended, but it makes a lot more sense to me if I read it as "until the value of his experience expired."

I don't think "experience" in general could possibly expire (it's just another word for "knowledge", after all!), but certainly individual experiences can become irrelevant.
Check out harris-tree/briffa_sep98_e.pro - http://di2.nu/foia/harris-tree/briffa_sep98_e.pro

You'll see that it is used in that version of the program.
On the topic of noob contributions... PG, can you please include the "flag" links on /noobstories? It's irritating needing to click through to each spam submission in order to flag them.

This same request was made by jacquesm on the 'Feature Requests' page 84 days ago, but that item seems to be something of a black hole.
Well, you don't need a 100Mbit pipe for a dumb terminal. There is nothing preventing a useful remote desktop session on wifi to your workstation back on campus. Except possibly for an overzealous IT department (the kind that blocks upgrading from IE6 because of "security risks").

Also, what you are describing is a job in a bureaucracy. This kind of environment isn't something do be proud of, it's something you work despite (though this is my personal preference, and there may be people who like this).

The point of the article isn't that it's easy for any workplace to accomodate a mother working from home. It's that it is doable. This depends on someone higher up in management having the will to do this. But this is a management problem, not a problem of discrimination against women.

Basically, this is not a problem if the people higher up in the food chain would start treating their subordinates as human beings. Which, sadly, might just be too much to ask of a lot of managers.
In general, prizes awarded by judges in contests are not a very good predictor.

Judges are usually busy people. They're not going to work that hard to figure out who's the best. They'll tend to be fooled by superficial polish.

I was a judge at TechCrunch 50 this fall. A few weeks later we had YC interviews. I don't think I was any more slack than the other TC50 judges, but there was no comparison between how hard I worked to pick the best startups in the two cases. Not only was I going to have to put money into the YC startups, whoever we picked was going to become part of the YC community from then on.

In fact, after having interviewed so many startups under conditions where getting the right answer really mattered, I found I had to consciously suppress my tendency to ask probing questions. Even so I think I seemed unduly harsh compared to the other judges.
There's nothing stopping them is there. Any mother that wants to program can, and they can easily find work to do at home.

The fact is though that most mothers aren't interested in programming :/ Something that doesn't really need 'fixing' (Because it's up to them what their interests are).
Japanese Addresses: the opposite is also true [video]
If you resonated with the article's points, the author's philosophy resonates with Stoicism.

http://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/04/13/stoicism-101...
Sure, there's a lot of BS that goes on, you're supposed to provide an address you're staying at in the US as well.
Last time I flew (UK-US), I didn't know the address (I know how to drive there, can't remember the address though), so the kind check-in assistant just put "hilton, san fransisco" or something.

Another time I got pulled over for a hand luggage check. I had packed my laptop bag to bursting with various gadgets cables toys food etc etc etc. The guy opened it up, took one look inside and his face fell. You could see he was thinking "I'll be damned if I'm going to unpack all that and pack it back up". So he didn't, and just waved me along.

Perhaps I'm just lucky, but I don't think they really check too much. Which is actually slightly worrying.
Thanks for sharing this story. I've always admire Buckminster Fuller's work and this makes me respect him more.
Good points. But I wanted to respond to the last:

> A final point then: Does hearing a respected jury tell you
>your plans are the bee's knees make you more hesistant to
>change them or throw them overboard when things aren't
>taking off?

Maybe, maybe not. But having that same jury tell you your plans are bad and why they are bad is extremely useful. So I wouldn't write off these competitions entirely.
It's even better if you read the Briffa letter to Nature that he cited: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v391/n6668/abs/391678a0...

Something completely unknown is making tree rings too small after 1960. And if you correlate your tree ring data to post-1960 temperatures it makes historical temperature look way too high.

Bizarro-Briffa sent a similar letter to Bizarro-Nature warning of an unknown divergence problem and saying not to correlate tree rings to pre-1960 temperatures because it makes historical temperature look way too low.
I originally posted this comment on the blog post, but since it isn't going through, I'll add it here:

Sorry, but I don’t have any juicy arguments for you. I agree with most of the concerns you raised here. It would be foolish for any startup to build their business in the way you described in the hotel example. In my understanding of the suggestions put forward by those exploring the lean startup methodology, the point is to be lean, not starving.

If you have a repeatable sales model, based on actual customer activity, hell yeah… go for broke. It doesn’t make any sense to just grow a little bit. On the other end of the equation, it doesn’t make much sense to front load your sales and marketing team with a budget of $100million based on assumptions which don’t have customer actions to back it up.

All that to say, I don’t understand the point of leanstartup methodology as being cheap for the sake of being cheap. But rather, not dumping money and resources into aspects of the business which haven’t been verified by actual paying customers.
Narraciones: La verdad
Research: Chronically Ill Patients Might Be Happier if They Give Up Hope
Newbie Post: Wild Wild East: No angels for early stage startups in India?
That's because you're leaving the house and getting away from a constant distraction. This is exactly why trying to work from home at the same time you are being a stay-from-home-parent is incredibly hard.

Believe me, I've tried doing programming work during periods while watching our young son, and it is nigh impossible to do any heavy duty work unless he is sleeping. Writing one-line unit tests is doable. Debugging complicated code is just barely possible if you are lucky. Breaking new ground is downright impossible.

I suspect the author of the original post is not actually a mother...
Reliability isn't measured by the recency of an incident, but in incidences per period of time. Reading the link above should be evidence enough that Linode's customers are generally happy with the reliability over the long-term.
Customer development is kind of faddy at the moment, and you are right that you can't get too extreme with things, but frankly in this case I think you're just doing it wrong.

The customer development model is a tool to help you find a market (actual paying customers) for your idea. It is not a growth strategy.

It helps with the early part of the TALC (Technology Adoption Life Cycle). It is a tool to help you find early adopters and early customer segments that allow you to Cross the Chasm.

One of the hardest things about managing TALC is knowing where you are in it. I think maybe you managed to find an early market but didn't shift your operational strategy & tactics to reflect your progress.

I would suggest you read Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado. They are very, very good books. I read them over 10 years ago and haven't found them to be wrong yet.
I think India does require higher level executives. Ie COO, CFOs, CEOs etc. Ie leaders who know how to take a company from $20 million yearly revenue to $200 million and then to $1 billion.

I have friends in Mckinsey who consult at this level and the reason they get work in India is because lack of talent at this level.

Its the reason that at this level you can probably make as much in India as you would in the US regardless of PP.

The good thing about this situation is that if your an "re-pat" from the US you could get one of these jobs even if you;ve only been managing 10-14 people before. Ie scary big opportunities which you would not get here in the states till you'd put in 10 years at a firm.
Did you read the article? That was the whole point of the article.

For example: Returnees run into trouble when they “look Indian but think American,”

It was specifically talking about people who had spent lots of time outside of India (if not their entire lives) before going (back) to India. It was not referring to people that had just gone to grad school abroad then went right back.
Passionate About Work - A Poets View
It's almost a little sad to hear that having a child brings down a woman's ability to go into a good working profession... running a startup takes a long time, and many founders end up having kids in the midst of all the action. (Evan Williams just had a child a few months back...) but women don't have that fortune.

I was speaking to a female VC a few weeks ago on being a professional and having kids. She told me flat out not to think about having kids until my thirties (if ever), because it's the only way. And even then, it's going to take a crap load of time away from your job.
Summary: Send a gift card (e.g. $20) with links to the apps in the message.
Dear hackers, I pushed my "Hacker Top" program to github.
I've known it as lowerCamel and UpperCamel
A few days ago I started pushing all the projects that I had done since 2007 to Git Hub and found this awesome program! I had already forgotten that I had written it! Try it out and if you like it, please contribute! :)

Ps. I currently have pushed 12 projects and have 19 projects left. I am pushing 1-2 works per day, because none of them have a good readme, and I have to write it. If you are interested in my works, you can follow my github profile.
Perhaps we can expect more of this in the future:

"We didn't know the Onion was not a real news site."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8237558.stm
If they can get the right team in place, it will be a cinch to kick the United State's ass in the next 10 years. Our space program has become a jobs program. Innovative work is discouraged while doing the same stuff for an incredible markup is the name of the game. Bureaucratic aparatchiks are the movers and shakers in that world. Their inertia will keep the US back if someone else wants to step up to the plate and kick some ass.
Python internals: Working with Python ASTs
> That was a very sophisticated formulation of "I don't listen to people whose politics I disagree with."

It wasn't. It was an argument for believing that "in many cases it matters where the arguments that I hear come from."

Let me be clear: I don't like the fact that I think this policy is right. I just think it's right.

And let me also be clear that in many or most cases it makes sense to disregard the source of an argument. In most exchanges on HN, the people involved all implicitly agree on the data that's being argued from, and in those cases I tend to think that we don't ever need to think about people's biases.

But the fundamental belief underlying the "we can always disregard an argument's source" movement is that sufficiently logical and dispassionate people can validate or invalidate an argument very easily (compared to the work it took to formulate the argument in the first place). I really really would like this to be true. I just don't think it is, IN GENERAL.

To reiterate why: I think it's perfectly possible to follow a logical train of thought without actually re-deriving that train of thought -- and so I think that we can untangle argument and arguer when arguments are purely logical -- but if an argument is based on data from a complex system I don't think it's possible to determine if that data was chosen in an unbiased manner without actually looking at all the available data and essentially re-deriving the arguer's conclusion.

Combine that with two hopefully-obvious (and hopefully-true) premises: first, that a large data set on any sufficiently complex system contains individual data points that support any given belief about that system,

and second, that most really complex systems can't be considered completely logically, because there's so much going on, and must instead be approached by looking at data, and I think it follows that you need to think about the source of any argument about a complex system when you're deciding whether you (provisionally) believe it.

Incidentally, I find it genuinely ironic that your post is actually a not-particularly-sophisticated example of "I don't listen to people whose politics I disagree with," since you ignored my argument based on my dissenting conclusion.
The problem with that logic is that Apple doesn't just put its money in a corporate savings account they invest it (a savings account of any kind would be financial malpractice on the part of the CFO). When you hear about how much money Apple has that isn't their bank balance its their easily liquidated assets (a.k.a. assets that can be turned into cash quickly)

Those investments are split into groups depending on their levels of risk but just about every cent gets pumped into the economy in some way. Whether its CDs which guarantee the bank funding so they can give loans or investing in companies which employ people. One way or another that money is active in some way.

Companies have CFOs in order to get the best return on their assets and that requires investment (and investment is what fuels an economy)
If you think the purpose of this is to be "enlightening", I suspect you may have missed the point. It's funny, in much the same way as the Principia Discordia is funny, and that's about it. It does rather a good job at it, too, imho.
The iPhone Apps Apple Didn't Want Us To Use, Now Revealed
Biometric Based Unique ID Project - A Staggering Cost
India is currently implementing a Unique ID Project. The project is headed by one of the most famed CEOs from India. The cost of the project has been guesstimated to be Rs. 1.5 lakh corers (1.5 x 10^12) = USD $ 32 billion.

The London School of Economics had done a study and found this technology to have serious implementation issues.

[Source]: http://ibnlive.in.com/news/id-project-a-challenge-but-worth-the-risk-nilekani/101290-3.html

Is there anything which the taxpayers should be worried about? Is there any feedback that the technical community would like to give to the taxpayers and other recipients of this project?
The 10 1/2 hour workday is surprisingly common in several departments here; I'm not sure how the fact that an academic environment is bureaucratic, even for staff programmers, makes me a "normal programmer".
You are talking about a small niche, I am (and most others are) talking generally. There is nothing exclusive about those kind of jobs in India, you will find them in most developing countries.

Most of these people, the articles is referring to, are going to India for nationalistic reason, with some kind of assurance from government about job security. Not necessarily because they will have better opportunity there. A small group of people might, but most won't.
Cadence & Slang is a book about interaction design.
It does notice users on the site. And people can return the products afterwards. On their BBB profile it says most of their issues are resolved.

Why is everyone taking Arrington's word for it. It doesn't even seem like he did any research besides a quick glance at their site.

For all you know video professor makes it's money by tricking people to try, only to have people realize it was worth the 300 dollars.

I don't deny any tricking on their website, but they do have a return and refund policy that seems satisfiable. It just doesn't add up. How can they sustain their business if people can refund.
Announcing Haskell 2010
Something that slightly bothered me: Pike was asked if go would have something like rubygems, and he said he had no idea what ruby gems are and how ruby handles third party packages.

This is troubling because I've written a couple libraries for go, and it would be awesome to have something similar to rubygems or pypi to distribute them.