| A | B | C | D | E | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Comment Text | Author | # Points | Date | Comment URL |
2 | "the rising star of venture capital" -unknown VC eating lunch on SHR | sama | 5 | October 2006 | URL |
3 | I noticed a several people suggesting features in other threads, so I'm starting one explicitly for that. I know there's a lot that needs improving; the site is pretty bare-bones at this stage. So propose whatever new features you think we need, and vote for the ones that you want most. | pg | 53 | February 2007 | URL |
4 | Please, when visiting already-submitted-stories via the bookmarklet, DON'T consider that an upvote. I'm just using it to find the comment thread. | joshwa | 22 | March 2007 | URL |
5 | "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses" - Henry Ford | curio | 27 | April 2007 | URL |
6 | I posted the following comment in defense of my co-founder Wayne: Jay, It is supremely unfair of you to characterize my co-founder as irresponsible, selfish, and ruining his family. I have never met a man who loves his wife more than Wayne. He and his wife reached a decision together that the best thing for their family and their future was for him to come start a company. Your post makes it sound as if he snuck over the fence in the middle of the night. It is one thing to attack a business, or even to attack the visible leader of said business. But to slander a good hard working father, husband, and friend is criminal. You owe him a public apology. Sincerely, Robby Walker EDIT: it appears he listened - the language has been softened a bit and he apologized. | rwalker | 17 | May 2007 | URL |
7 | Don't worry, I'm not going to post a link about each releaselet. I just wanted to thank PB for helping us. | pg | 24 | June 2007 | URL |
8 | "Did you win the Putnam?" Yes, I did. | cperciva | 168 | July 2007 | URL |
9 | Thanks. My productivity just went into a corner and shot itself. | dfranke | 39 | August 2007 | URL |
10 | Paul Graham is so good, he always tips using $2.56 cheques made out by Donald Knuth. | hazchem | 53 | September 2007 | URL |
11 | Airing your dispute in a public forum like this makes you both seem like damaged goods. | pg | 81 | October 2007 | URL |
12 | Man, I had shit to get done this afternoon. | brett | 56 | January 2008 | URL |
13 | APOLOGIES for making this post so annoyingly long, but I really hope you find value in the words below. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- I'm going to first share a personal experience from my early trading days to illustrate where I'm coming from. I used to wake up at 4:30 am everyday in the Chicago suburbs to beat rush hour traffic and make it into downtown Chicago at 6:30 am. In order to wake up so early, I fell into a habit of sleeping at 9:00 pm and like a robot waking up at 4:30 am. This simple routine was indirectly helpful when things seemed darkest. For the first six months, I lost money and was ridiculed constantly by other traders who were more successful than me (which was about 20 other guys CONSTANTLY using me as a punching/whipping bag). The only thing that kept me going was the fact that some of the very same traders that would be making wise cracks at me for losing money were some of the most successful people I knew at the time. For better or worse, if I needed a trader to model myself after, it was the same people that were telling me how bad a trader I was - and although I was not open to really hear what they were saying, they were right about my skills in every way (but their feedback was always packaged in some sort of insult). After racking up some rather hefty losses, I was determined to quit at one point during month four, but because I had a habit of waking up at 4:30 am I simply "forgot" that the night before I told myself I would quit and spare myself further humiliation...by then I was warned that I was now on the red list of traders ready to be cut. Also, my personal savings were starting to approach zero (the base "draw" for house traders was enough to pay for food; you usually make your money on a percentage of your profits, and I was deep in the red at the time). To say the least, there were many excellent reasons to be "reasonable", forget about my dreams, and quit. After 4 consecutive "failures to quit", I realized that I didn't quit because somewhere deep down I was hanging on to a dream, however remote at that point: that I could somehow be as successful as the other traders that I knew. At the same time I realized that I had hit rock bottom in that I couldn't even succeed in failing! Very tough times indeed... An interesting point to note here is that although my losses were starting to get very large, the people who were funding me as a trader kept me because I had one redeeming quality: EFFORT, and this helped build tenacity. Other traders who barely traded but had a fraction of my losses were cut much faster because they didn't put forth much effort. They were not willing to take losses and be bold/brave and fight it out; I was willing to take risks, and this saved me from getting cut faster than others. Slowly I began to reinterpret the constant humiliation I was suffering: perhaps the other traders were right about their "jokes" and there might be something in what they are saying that will help me get out of the red. I also realized that since I had failed at quitting (which was now the ULTIMATE failure), there was no further failure for me and that if I took baby steps they were surely to succeed (this translated into taking smaller trades/profits). Only after improving upon my abilities as a trader and channeling my energies appropriately did I succeed and earn everybody's respect as a trader (and you have no idea how this made me feel!). I quickly made enough in commissions to be trading my own account, and be successful as an independent trader onward. When I look back at those final months of 1999 (yeah that's right, I was losing huge cash at the end of 1999 when the entire market was going crazy UP!), there was more good than bad even when I was getting my ass handed to me. It's just that I was intentionally creating my own feedback (I'm right everybody else is wrong) instead of seeing the results I was getting (losses/insults) as feedback and information that would help me be successful. I kind of snicker every time I see somebody ask for feedback on their startup on YC.News only to end up justifying themselves by telling everybody why they did what they did when they get negative feedback, which is the feedback of greatest value. If somebody tells you how crappy your idea is, thank them that they even spent a few brain cycles considering your idea. The lessons I learned from this that are perhaps relevant to your questions: - Determine if you believe in yourself to succeed as an individual (I know this sounds odd, but for a moment just examine your thought patterns and your actions and see what message you are sending to yourself; do you listen to the voice that says you can't or are you paying attention to the feedback from your efforts and the results you are getting?) - Search deep down inside and see if the project you are working on is something you believe in or not. If you can't sell yourself, then you shouldn't bother trying any further... - ANY attention you get for your efforts is good attention. If you get LOTS of negative feedback, then be grateful - you've jumped the first hurdle of getting people to give a damn about what you are doing! :) - There is responsibility and accountability that goes with both success and failure. You need to be ready for both because they can be equally painful in equal ways. The amount of accountability that comes with success can be more unbearable than the accountability that accompanies failure. I personally know of some very talented people who enjoyed phenomenal initial success only to find just as fast that they were in over their heads. - The more you resist the possibility of failure then you are less likely to recognize possibilities that will help you succeed. If you are afraid to fail, then most certainly you are afraid to succeed. This sounds counterintuitive but it's based upon the fact that fear makes your mind less supple and less responsive to the changes that will push you out of the game - or conversely it will lessen the impulse to jump on the opportunities you need to succeed. - The results you get has everything to do with your users/market and less to do with you as an individual; it's sometimes hard to separate these two. See the other side of the equation and what side you are on before trying to solve it. Don't ever think you are above the feedback of your users...EVER! - Don't have expectations (this is just setting yourself up for failure). Because you are starting out you may not know what is best to help you succeed - ESPECIALLY if you're lacking motivation. Keep in mind that whatever results you get from your efforts will lead to more possibilities (in the form of additional information). - Have some behavioral "context" within which to exercise discipline and structure. Seek to grow your efforts within this context. My context was my sleep schedule. It was a routine that was so ingrained that my drive had a laser focus. This might not work for some, but it worked for me. Finally, I will add that in my opinion failing hard and fast is MUCH better than failing slowly. The faster you know for certain something isn't going to work out, the sooner you can cut your losses and move on to your next idea. When you eventually succeed, you will look back at all the times you were quick to cut your losses and get to where you are... --------------------------------------------------------- Please do NOT contact me asking for advice in trading/investing. This is a VERY personal thing, and it has everything to do with who you are, NOT with how much information you have, or which tools you use, or who you know. | fiaz | 64 | February 2008 | URL |
14 | Paul Graham's essays have this weird Rorschach quality whereby people see wildly different things in them. Some readers even get infuriated and seek relief in the judgment that Paul Graham is an arrogant asshole. But I don't buy that. (For one thing, if he were, then this site would be more of a personality cult than it is, and many of us would be long gone.) So I'm curious as to why his essays have this effect on people. It is the essays, by the way. You don't hear people saying, "He sold Viaweb to Yahoo? What an asshole!" or "He started a new kind of investment fund, the arrogant prick!" I've got a little theory. It seems to me that the provocative thing about the essays is their aesthetic . They're governed by a particular style. One principle in it is minimalism: compress the writing until everything extraneous is gone. Another is vividness: whatever is being said, seek the phrase or image that throws the point into the sharpest possible relief. The dominant quality of the essays is that they pursue this aesthetic with utter ruthlessness. Anything that would use a few extra words to reassure the reader is thrown out. Anything that would tone down an idea a little bit to make it more palatable is thrown out. There isn't any room for these things because the author is optimizing for something else - say, meaning per word count. In fact, an entire dimension of language, the phatic dimension, is thrown out. So, Paul Graham's writing is radically aphatic. That's disorienting. People are used to writing that includes, among its various threads, one whose purpose is to reassure you that the author is a nice guy, that he might be wrong, you can still get along even if you disagree, and so on. This is not only absent from the essays, it's been deliberately excised. On top of that, what is there has been distilled for maximum impact and often touches subjects that people have strong emotions about, such as programming languages and what the hell we're doing with our lives :). Not surprisingly, some readers feel punched in the gut. For them, an obvious explanation is ready at hand: Paul Graham's writing is like this because he is like this. He must be someone who doesn't care how others feel and wants only to magnify his own grandiose ideas. In short, an arrogant asshole. I think this explains why people project so much emotion into what they read in those essays. "Oh... you haven't founded a company? You suck." But the essays never say anything like that. People don't read them this way because they say such things. They read them this way because they lack the kinds of things writers are expected to put in to stave off provocation. They lack these things not because the author is an asshole but because he cares about a certain style of writing . Enough, in fact, to pursue it ruthlessly... in his writing. To naively map that back to the personality of the writer is an obvious error, a kind of reverse ad hominem. But it's an understandable error. There aren't many people who care that much about an aesthetic. (I mean "aesthetic" in a broad sense, by the way. As much a way of thinking as a cosmetic thing.) No doubt there is a connection between an author's personality and his style, but it's hardly an isomorphism. I don't know Paul Graham, but I know he doesn't talk the way he writes. For one thing, one can point to examples (like the interview in Founders At Work). For another, nobody talks like that. | gruseom | 73 | March 2008 | URL |
15 | Writing is much like being a single founder. I find the single most important thing is to be aware of how motivated you are, and to adjust the work accordingly. If you try to work on hard stuff when you're low, you'll just procrastinate. But if you start working on easy stuff, getting something done will put you into a better mood, and you'll be able to move on to harder stuff. Hemingway used to leave something easy unfinished in the evenings, so he had something to start with in the mornings. That works for me too, with both writing and hacking. | pg | 84 | April 2008 | URL |
16 | sudo Ask PG: please make me a sandwich. | rms | 85 | May 2008 | URL |
17 | Article in short: Geosign was doing "search arbitrage", which meant buying keywords from Google and filling their landing pages with ads from other providers (e.g. Yahoo). Google didn't like that. The end. | huhtenberg | 92 | June 2008 | URL |
18 | Please remove up-vote buttons from the main page for unvisited links. An absence of these buttons could enforce a vote-after-read policy. Titles are easily abused therefore It is not a good idea to vote based only on title without reading comments and/or a linked page. It could diminish a number of bait-like sensational titles too. | d0mine | 101 | July 2008 | URL |
19 | Another utterly vacuous post knocking frameworks to whore some traffic. | mtkd | 60 | August 2008 | URL |
20 | more appropriate title: "i'm in, baby" | noodle | 74 | September 2008 | URL |
21 | It was terrible. People were forced to eat raw fish for sustenance. They couldn't get full-sized electronics, so they were forced to make tiny ones. Unable to afford proper entertainment, folks would make do by taking turns to get up and sing songs. | hugh | 79 | October 2008 | URL |
22 | > He did not rape me. That's the most glowing endorsement if I ever did see one. | alaskamiller | 90 | November 2008 | URL |
23 | I sold my startup a few months ago for enough cash that I never have to work or worry about money again. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=341565 I went to the most peaceful spot I could find, and relaxed. I did nothing. http://www.vimeo.com/1292105 After only a couple days, it was never more clear that I was never doing anything for the money anyway, and the reason I'm always working, driving, pushing, learning, growing, and building companies is NOT about the future-goal but increasing the quality of my present moment. It's exciting! It's fun! So, I started working again. Not because I have to, but beacuse I want to. It makes my brain spark in a way that not-working doesn't. So here I am again, programming, excited about some new thing I'm working on, exactly the same as before I sold the company. I didn't buy anything because there's nothing I want. My debts were already paid off. Philip Greenspun's article really does describe it best. http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/early-retirement/ So does Felix Dennis' book How to Get Rich. http://www.amazon.com/dp/1591842050 Feel free to contact me directly if you have any specific questions you don't feel comfortable posting on the board here. http://sivers.org - Derek | sivers | 106 | December 2008 | URL |
24 | I've also noticed comments modded down to To the new users: If you disagree with a comment, please reply to it, stating why. Don't just blindly downmod it. Just my 2c | axod | 91 | January 2009 | URL |
25 | Ok, but Dijkstra would be the last person to use a go to statement in step 3. | waldrews | 108 | February 2009 | URL |
26 | Ok, ok, enough Erlang submissions. You guys are like the crowdsourced version of one of those troublesome overliteral genies. I meant more that it would be better not to submit and upvote the fluffier type of link. Without those we'll be fine. | pg | 245 | March 2009 | URL |
27 | Sample size error. | fallentimes | 121 | April 2009 | URL |
28 | People who are really good at their jobs obsess about their tools- artists obsess over their paint, carpenters obsess over their power tools, cooks obsess over their knives. PHP is like buying a chef's knife at Wal-Mart. You can create a 5 star dish with it, it cuts perfectly fine, but it doesn't inspire the same passion that a Shun knife does. Most restaurants in fact, don't use fancy-knives, they use just regular knives and it works out just fine. But, to draw the analogy back to programming, we're not regular restaurants. We're wannabe "rock-star" chefs- coding and "startup-ing" isn't just a job, it's part of our core ethos, so we obsess over all the tools we use, the text editor, the monitor, even the chair- because it makes the experience all that much better. Most people do this about things they seriously care about. Runners debate intricacies of running shoes or the perfect in race meal. I've had debates with weight-lifters about weight-lifting gloves. Go over to a different forum, and you will hear arguments about the perfect size of a suit lapel. The "Everyman" tools can always accomplish 100% of the job, but provide 90% of the experience. We spend an inordinate amount of time trying to get that last 10% out. Is it probably unnecessary? Yeah. But people really bond over passions, and in arguing/debating that last 10%, you can really connect with people, which is why sites like Hacker News are fun and addictive. | unexpected | 133 | May 2009 | URL |
29 | Thanks to dfranke for giving us time to release a fix, and in fact writing part of it. | pg | 223 | June 2009 | URL |
30 | The notion that being 'committed' to open source means that a company should give away everything of value is ludicrous. Google came up with great software that makes millions of peoples' lives easier, and they have every right to keep it secret and profit off of it. The zealous idea that open source and trade secrets cannot coexist is detrimental to the open source movement as a whole, in my opinion. | showerst | 104 | December 2009 | URL |
31 | This is incredible. This is the first time, I have seen a LARGE company * Putting its users above profits * Stand up to Chinese Government. Since accounts of human rights activists were targeted, this operation was clearly done at the behest of Chinese Government. I'm disgusted by the levels to which the Chinese Government can stoop. It is time the world stands up to China. If a corporation, whose main aim is to generate profits can eschew it and take a moral high ground why can't the government do it? Are the cheap goods from china so necessary that it is not worth antagonizing China ? EDIT: Additional details from Enterprise blog post http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/01/keeping-your-da... It was an attack on the technology infrastructure of major corporations in sectors as diverse as finance, technology, media, and chemical This is clearly an act of espionage by the Chinese Government. The bigger questions is whether these are the only companies targeted or the only ones discovered. This is not the first time, the chinese have tried something like this. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7970471.stm The researchers said hackers were apparently able to take control of computers belonging to several foreign ministries and embassies across the world using malicious software | boundlessdreamz | 185 | January 2010 | URL |
32 | I have dealt with this law in depth, from every angle, from its inception in 1986 and have a few observations to make about it: 1. The technical issue concerns the tax risk to an employer whether someone functioning as an independent contractor might be reclassified as an employee via an IRS audit that finds that the person is in fact functioning as an employee and not as someone who runs his own business. This risk exists for every business, large or small, that hires contractors. And the rules by which the outcome is determined are positively byzantine and pretty hostile to employers (and to contractors). They are set forth in IRS Revenue Ruling 87-41 and are summarized here ( http://www.morebusiness.com/running_your_business/taxtalk/in... ). In general, they state that if an employer has the right to control the means and manner by which someone performs his duties, as opposed to being concerned strictly with the result, then the person is functioning as an employee. They also set forth a list of 20 factors that auditors are to use to help to decide the issue, making this legal determination a very detailed facts-and-circumstances determination that can easily turn one way or the other depending on how an auditor chooses to apply a range of detailed factors. In the background, the law also has cases, precedents, administrative decisions and rulings, etc. that boggle the mind in their complexity concerning how the "rules" work. Moreover, the penalties associated with having a group of contractors reclassified as employees can be extreme. The employer must not only pay employment taxes (Social Security, etc.) for all such persons but also associated penalties and interest. The kicker in the case of a major audit covering several years is even worse because, if the employer can no longer locate the persons involved to get them to sign affidavits attesting that they in fact paid income tax on the income received, the employer also gets stuck having to pay the estimated income taxes for each such reclassified person. In practice, this can amount to a penalty that amounts to nearly half of the wage base involved in the dispute. 2. As one might imagine, this is a horrible landscape for companies to try to traverse without something that eliminates or sharply limits the above risks when they deal with contractors. And, to what should be nobody's surprise, such limits have historically existed to enable companies to have some rational means of dealing with the contractor issue. The limits appear in what are called "safe harbor" classifications. This means that a company hiring contractors can know with reasonable certainty that there will be no reclassification of the contractors as employees as long as the company complies with the safe harbor rules. These rules in turn vary from industry to industry but every industry has them. This is how companies hire sales people as contractors, for example, without incurring major risks of tax liabilities. 3. The 1986 law referred to in this article repealed the "safe harbor" provisions for providers of high-tech services. Thus, there was no law passed that said, "You are barred from hiring tech service providers as contractors." Companies can hire such contractors as much as they like. The repeal of the safe harbor for this type of service provider (and for no other ) had the practical effect of making such service providers unmarketable to companies that had no interest whatever in taking on major tax risks just to be dealing with contractors as opposed to employees. 4. Just a background note on this repeal. Before the 1986 repeal, it was true that companies throughout Silicon Valley would hire "contractors" who would literally do, e.g., a 3-year stint working full-time at one desk for one supervisor on one project. Whatever else these persons were, they were clearly functioning as employees. They had to report for work at designated times and in a designated place. They took direct orders from supervisors on when, how, and where to perform specific duties throughout the course of a project or series of projects. There was nothing in such relationships remotely resembling a situation of a company dealing with a person who was in his "own business." In essence, what the companies were doing was hiring employees, calling them contractors, and saving the trouble of having to pay them employee benefits and employment taxes for their services. These were clearly abuses, and they prevailed at all sorts of Valley companies (Intel, HP, all the biggies). Thus, by 1986, this was an area ripe for attack. How did this happen in Congress? Well, 1986 was the great bipartisan coming-together for the lowering of individual tax rates in exchange for closing a variety of tax loopholes and tightening of tax requirements. In the midst of this bipartisan compromise, Congress took note of the abuses happening in Silicon Valley and repealed the safe-harbor classifications for high-tech service providers as a means of eliminating what was perceived as an abusive loophole. 5. While the above explains why the tech industry happened to get singled out as it did in 1986, it does not eliminate the fact that this safe-harbor repeal was in fact a highly discriminatory act in that every industry in American had safe-harbor rules available to it so that it could reasonably hire contractors while the tech industry was suddenly left without any such rules at all. Thus, from 1986 forward, tech companies became terrorized at the thought of hiring contractors under any circumstances (by the way, one of the last holdouts, Microsoft, continued to use large numbers of contractors and got slammed for this in major rulings that came out by the early 1990s, if I recall, though that case involved much more than tax issues). 6. Almost instantly from 1986 and on, a cottage industry sprang up of "placement agents" who would, in effect, assume the employee risk by hiring the tech-service providers directly and, in turn, contracting with companies to place them there as contractors. This worked for the tech companies because, from their perspective, they simply signed a contractor agreement with the placement firm and paid for the work as contract work. The placement firm, for its part, would then hire the tech-service providers mostly as W-2 employees and occasionally (if they were adventuresome) as contractors. If they retained individuals as contractors, though, they ran the risk of having those persons reclassified as employees and so faced the risk at their level that the tech companies once had directly. Because of this risk, most placement firms would not take on tech people as contractors unless they could have what they perceived as a strong case of calling them true contractors. The practical result of this was that, if a tech-service provider wanted to hire on to a placement firm as a contractor, he would first have to incorporate himself and then the placement firm would take on his company. The irony here is that the tax regulations behind the 1986 repeal specifically provided that it was irrelevant whether or not a sole contractor had incorporated himself and that this fact was to be disregarded in making the tax determination. Thus, though the fact of incorporation was technically irrelevant, most placement firms were happy to take people on as contractors once they had become incorporated. Go figure. (This article, by the way, discusses how the IRS would target such incorporated individuals in search of audit opportunities). 7. After 1986, it became virtually impossible for a tech service provider to hire himself out directly to a company as a contractor. Every one of the large Valley companies adopted strict rules forbidding this. In rare cases, someone might get through the rules if the person was incorporated but even then most times the answer from the company was no. Companies simply re-did their hiring practices and thereafter took on contractors pretty much strictly through placement firms and no longer directly. 8. For a tech service provider looking to go into business, this essentially put up an impregnable practical wall to finding reasonable opportunities to work independently in the tech world, at least in terms of providing services to the larger companies. This remains the case today as well, since the law has not changed in the decade following publication of this article. 9. By the way, this is not just a "big company" issue. Even little businesses can get into trouble without the benefit of safe-harbor protections. If you as a founder hire an early-stage contractor (which is often done) and later terminate the relationship, that person can go file for unemployment on the theory that he was in fact an employee of your company and had functioned as such. This in turn can easily trigger an audit of your entire company's history in this area (1099s you have issued are an easy way for the auditors to focus on key areas). Should this happen to you, you find yourself going down a rabbit hole that is likely to be unpleasant. (An aside: one reason to incorporate as a startup is that reclassification penalties/taxes apply only to the entity and not to the founders directly). 10. To sum up, then: there is no law forbidding tech people from offering their services as independent contractors but such persons face serious practical barriers in building a service business because employers will not hire them as contractors for fear of having their status reclassified in a later audit. This is pure discrimination against tech people. No one else is burdened in this particular way in wanting to set up a service business. The fix is an easy one for Congress to make but I have seen no movement on this whatever. For the near future, I am afraid tech service providers are stuck and have no real remedy for this problem. | grellas | 217 | February 2010 | URL |
33 | Don't worry, it doesn't mean anything. The software for ranking applications runs on the same server, and it is horribly inefficient (something 4 people use every 6 months doesn't tend to get optimized much). This weekend all of us were reading applications at the same time, and the system was getting so slow that I banned crawlers for a bit to buy us some margin. (Traffic from crawlers is much more expensive for us than traffic from human users, because it interacts badly with lazy item loading.) We only finished reading applications an hour before I had to leave for SXSW, so I forgot to set robots.txt back to the normal one, but I just did now. | pg | 192 | March 2010 | URL |
34 | I don't really have a politically correct way to say this: What a horseshit maneuver by Apple. | icey | 211 | April 2010 | URL |
35 | Considering that Facebook has asked for my email username and password in order to scrape the contacts from my email, this seems hypocritical. So, it's ok for Facebook to scrape data from other sites since that's data going into Facebook (per the user's wishes), but it isn't ok for other sites to scrape Facebook data (per the user's wishes). | mdasen | 135 | May 2010 | URL |
36 | I'm going to go and replace 3 years with a "short time frame". Some things to focus on: - Market opportunity- a million dollars isn't a lot in the grand scheme of things, but it certainly is a lot if the market opportunity is not large enough. Even if you put Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as founders in a new venture with a total market size of 10 million, there is no way they could become too wealthy without completely changing the business (ie- failing). - Inequality of information- find a place where you know something that many undervalue. Having this inequality of information can give you, your first piece of leverage. - Leverage skills you know- You can go into new fields such as say Finance, but make sure you're leveraging something you already know such as technology and/or product. Someone wanted to start a documentary with me. I said that would be fun, but it would be my first documentary regardless of what happened. There was a glass ceiling due to that. If I do something leveraging a skill I know, I'm already ahead of the game. - Look in obscure places- We're often fascinated with the shiny things in the internet industry. Many overlook the obscure and unsexy. Don't make that mistake. If your goal has primarily monetary motivations, look at the unsexy. - Surround yourself with smart people- smart people whom are successful usually got there by doing the same and have an innate desire to help those do the same. it's the ecosystem that's currently happening with the paypal mafia and can be traced all the way back to fairchild semiconductor. - Charge for something- Building a consumer property dependent upon advertising has easily made many millionaires, but it isn't the surest path. It takes a lot of time and scale, which due to cashflow issues will require large outside investment probably before you are a millionaire. Build something that you can charge for. - Your metric shouldn't be dollars- If you're going after a big enough market and charging a reasonable amount, you can hit a million dollars. Focus on growth, customer acquisition costs, lifetime value of the customer, and churn. - Get as many distribution channels as possible- There is some weird sense that if you build something they will just come. That a few like buttons and emails to editor@techcrunch.com will make your traffic explode + grow consistently. It fucking won't. Get as many distribution channels as possible. Each one by itself may not be large, but if you have many it starts to add up. It also diversifies your risk. If you're a 100% SEO play, you're playing a dangerous dangerous game. You're fully dependent upon someone else's rules. If Google bans you, you will be done. Replace SEO with: App store, facebook, etc. - Go with your gut and do not care about fameballing- Go with what your gut says, regardless of how it might look to the rest of the world. Too often we (I) get lost in caring about what people think. It usually leads to a wrong decision. Don't worry about becoming internet famous or appearing on teh maj0r blogz. Fame is fleeting in the traditional sense. Become famous with your customers. They're the ones that truly matter. What they think matters and they will ultimately put their money where their mouth is. - Be an unrelenting machine- Brick walls are there to show you how bad you want something. Commit to your goals and do not waver from them a one bit regardless of what else is there. I took this approach to losing weight and fitness. I have not missed a single 5k run in over a year. It did not matter if I had not slept for two days, traveling across the country, or whatever else. If your goals is to become a millionaire, you need to be an unrelenting machine that does not let emotions make you give up / stop. You either get it done with 100% commitment or you don't. Be a machine. - If it's a "trend", it's too late- This means the barriers to entry are usually too high at this point to have the greatest possible chance of success. Sure you could still make a lot of money in something like the app store or the facebook platform, but the chances are significantly less than they were in the summer of 08 or spring of 2007. You can always revisit past trends though. - If you do focus on a dollar amount, focus on the first $10,000- This usually means you've found some repeatable process / minimal traction. ie- if you're selling a $100 product, you've already encountered 100 people who have paid you. From here you can scale up. It's also a lot easier to take in when you're looking at numbers. Making 1 million seems hard, but making $10,000 doesn't seem so hard, right? - Be a master of information- Many think it might be wasteful that I spent so much time on newsyc or read so many tech information sites. It's not, it's what gives me an edge. I feel engulfed. - Get out and be social- Even if you're an introvert, being around people will give you energy. I'm at my worst when I'm isolated from people and at my best when I've at least spent some time with close friends (usually who I don't know from business.) - Make waves, don't ride them- There was a famous talk Jawed Karim gave from youtube. He described the three factors that made youtube take off. I think they included (1- emergence of flash, so no codecs required 2- one click upload 3- ability to share embed). Find those small pieces and put them together to make the wave. That's what youtube did imho. The other guys really just rode the wave they created (which is okay). - Say no way more than you say yes- I bet almost every web entrepreneur has encountered this: You demo your product / explain what you're doing and someone suggests that you do "X feature/idea". X is a really good idea and maybe even fits in with what you're doing, but it would take you SO FAR off the path you're on. If you implemented X it would take a ton of time and morph what you're doing. It's also really really hard to say no when it comes from someone well respected like a VC or famous entrepreneur. I mean how the fuck could they be wrong? Hell, they might even write me a check if I do what they say!!!!! Don't fall for that trap. Instead write the feedback down somewhere as one single data point to consider amongst others. If that same piece of feedback keeps coming up AND it fits within the guidelines of your vision, then you should consider it more seriously. Weight suggestions from paying customers a bit more, since their vote is weighted by dollars. - Be so good they can't ignore you- I first heard this quote from Marc Andreessen, but he stole it from Steve Martin. Just be so good with what you do that you can't be ignored. You can surely get away with a boring product with no soul, but being so good you can't ignore is much more powerful. - Always keep your door/inbox open- You never know who is going to walk through your door + contact you. Serendipity is a beautiful thing. At one point Bill Gates was just a random college kid calling an Albuquerque computer company. - Give yourself every opportunity you can- I use this as a reason why starting a company in silicon valley when it comes to tech is a good idea. You can succeed anywhere in the world, but you certainly have a better chance in the valley. You should give yourself every opportunity possible, especially as an entrepreneur where every advantage counts. - Give yourself credit- This is the thing I do the least of and I'm trying to work on it. What may seem simple+not that revolutionary to anyone ahead of the curve can usually be pure wizardry to the general public, whom is often your customer. Give yourself more credit. - Look for the accessory ecosystem- iPod/iPhone/iPad case manufacturers are making a fortune. Armormount is also making a killing by making flat panel wall mounts. Woothemes makes millions of dollars a year (and growing) selling Wordpress themes. There are tons of other areas here, but these are the ones that come to mind first. If there's a huge new product/shift, there's usually money to be made in the accessory ecosystem. - Stick with it- Don't give up too fast. Being broke and not making any money sucks + can often make you think nothing will ever work. Don't quit when you're down. If this was easy then everyone would be a millionaire and being a millionaire wouldn't be anything special. Certainly learn from your mistakes + pivot, but don't quit just because it didn't work right away. - Make the illiquid, liquid- I realized this after talking to a friend who helps trade illiquid real estate securities. A bank may have hundreds of millions of assets, but they're actually worth substantially less if they cannot be moved. If you can help people make something that is illiquid, liquid they will pay you a great deal of money. Giving you a 20-30% cut is worth it, when the opposite is making no money at all. - Productize a service- If you can make what might normally be considered a service into a scaleable, repeatable, and efficient process that makes it seem like a product you can make a good amount of money. In some ways, I feel this is what Michael Dell did with DELL in the early days. Putting together a computer is essentially a service, but he put together a streamlined method of doing things that it really turned it into a product. On a much smaller scale, PSD2XHTML services did this. It's a service, but the end result + what you pay for really feels like a product. | jasonlbaptiste | 247 | June 2010 | URL |
37 | You have to consider the number of users. HN now gets 60k unique visitors on weekdays. That's a decent sized stadium full of people. Of course they seem overwhelming collectively, but most individuals are only experts in a few areas. If it makes you feel any better, my biggest worry about this site is the opposite: that the median awesomeness is decreasing as the number of users increases. If you want to feel less overwhelmed, try reading the comments starting at the bottom of the page instead of the top. | pg | 225 | July 2010 | URL |
38 | Paul, Respectfully, it is not linkbait. This is my honest opinion based on Facebook's track record. I would give the same advice to any startup: don't trust Facebook and don't give them any access to your startup or plans. Period. End of story. If an entrepreneur needs any evidence of the trustworthiness of Facebook, simply talk to folks inside of Quora, FourSquare, Twitter and Zynga (among others). I'm sure you've spoken to folks inside these companies, like I have, who are infuriated with Zuckerberg's blatant stealing (without innovation). At every chance they can get, Facebook has simply stolen. Given their scale, bringing them inside the incubators is, well, mind boggling. If you're a startup company you should be avoiding Facebook and their staffers. I'm sure you have great intentions PG, and you know I respect all that you've accomplished, but don't dismiss me. I really don't need press because, to a certain extent, I am press. Add to that the fact that I'm massively overexposed (especially here on HN), and you're claim that I'm link-baiting feels disingenuous. Like you, I love startups and entrepreneurship. I only want to see folks do well and not get ripped off by Facebook, which I consider the most unethical company in technology. One only need to look at the mountain of lawsuits they've generated for proof of this. Facebook's long list of lawsuits are not from ambulance-chasing law firms mind you, they are by PARTNERS and FRIENDS of Zuckerberg's! Oh yeah, a lot of the lawsuits and complaints are also by privacy groups and government agencies trying to protect citizens. If Zuckerberg has no problem screwing his friends, partners and customers, what do you think he will do to a three-person startup that might innovate its way into being competition for him? I fear you've made a big mistake letting the fox into the henhouse. Startups: listen to PG on everything since he's brilliant--but take my advice on this one. :-) best jason | jasonmcalacanis | 179 | August 2010 | URL |
39 | I am late in joining this thread and will add only a few observations to supplement the many good comments already here: 1. Competitor collusion and express agreements to restrict the freedom of each to compete (i.e., horizontal contractual dealings) do indeed expose the colluding parties to potentially serious liabilities under the Sherman and FTC Acts. If that is what is going on here, then Mr. Arrington has fired a major warning shot to those involved asking, in effect, "are you insane to let yourselves get caught up in this sort of activity?" 2. The irony here is that competitors are completely free to have contacts with one another, to discuss industry problems, and even to work on solutions for how best to handle such problems, provided that such contacts aren't made for an anti-competitive purpose. This is how trade associations work, among other things, and angel investors can and do meet all the time to discuss common issues and problems. Such benign meetings and contacts are very different from colluding to restrict their ability to compete freely in the marketplace through agreements to suppress valuations, etc. 3. Parallel action by competitors is in itself normally quite harmless and does not subject them to liabilities (for example, the fact that angel investors tend to use common sets of investment documents, tend as a group to dislike convertible notes, etc.). Companies having nothing to complain about legally from the fact that a particular angel investor happens to engage in practices in common with others in the industry that founders happen not to like. All this changes, though, if the competitors (i.e., the angel investors) have engaged in suspicious activities such as secret meetings among themselves to discuss overt ways to limit competition, etc. 4. Nothing under the law stops any one of these angel investors from deciding as a business matter to form a new fund along with others of such investors and to engage through that fund as a competitor in the venture financing industry. In such case, the investors are no longer competitors and have simply combined forces to compete as a different entity in the industry. If, however, the parties effectively remain competitors and simply form a jointly controlled venture whose aim is to serve as a vehicle by which they might collude in suppressing competition, that vehicle would be unlawful. Putting all this together, the normal give and take among the myriad angel investors in the Valley and elsewhere is lawful and beyond reproach, even when they do meet to discuss problems. Meetings in a smoke-filled room as part of concerted efforts to restrict normal competitive activities by the participants, on the other hand, are almost blatantly illegal on the face of it and especially so when the participants are among the most prominent players in the industry. It may well be that some or most of these participants hadn't really realized that they were moving from the benign to the illegal in participating in such meetings over time, and this is where it seems that Mr. Arrington is doing a good turn for them by calling them out before they do something that is irretrievably wrong. Just speculating on this last point but that is how the tone of the piece strikes me. | grellas | 261 | September 2010 | URL |
40 | Living with one child is like living with a demanding, but mostly reasonable, roommate who really likes spending time with you until she goes to bed early. Having two or more children is like living in a circus where all the performers are deaf. | drblast | 180 | October 2010 | URL |
41 | I approve a warning 1000% - it's not like they are stopping you from exporting. This will slow down my AOL-using friends who gave away all their contact info to Facebook and now I get pelted with spam from Facebook using my name and list of friends (and I don't even have a Facebook account). Google has never spammed me or share my name and location, Facebook does it all the time, pick who's more evil. | ck2 | 168 | November 2010 | URL |
42 | sad. | joshu | 182 | December 2010 | URL |
43 | As a side note, news.ycombinator.com should really have HTTPS access. Passwords and cookies in clear HTTP are no good. Anyone here (should) knows it. Firesheep proves it. GMail and Zuckerberg suffered it. Just buy or get a free SSL certificate, and let nginx or stunnel handles SSL and proxies HTTP to/from Arc. Total cost, being pessimistic: 150$ for the certificate verification, and 2 hours to set-up the certs & nginx. I know, it's awesome, it's a custom Arc webserver and all, and good practices are for PHBs only, but still. For a "hacker" website, news.ycombinator.com is a shame regarding to privacy/security (see also: passwords stored as shasums (without even a salt), funny things like " rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/logout> , outdated versions of software used [ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516122 ], etc.) | requinot59 | 172 | January 2011 | URL |
44 | From the founder of the Innocence Project: What are other countries doing to improve their criminal justice systems? Canada is the first country in the world to have "innocence commissions". What they do is truly marvellous. They will perform a post-mortem on the case of a man who was wrongly convicted and find out what went wrong and what they can do to reduce the likelihood of it happening again in the future. That is what you do in science, that's what you do in medicine, that's what you do in every other institution where life or liberty is at stake. We don't do it in the US when it comes to criminal justice, and that is appalling. http://truthinjustice.org/neufeld-interview.htm | solipsist | 194 | February 2011 | URL |
45 | I don't know about the rest of the world, but we sure are in a bubble here at Hacker News. There seems to be a real disconnect between what people want to build/invest in and what people in the real world actually need and want to pay for. Just as sample of what I've witnessed in the past few years: Ask HN: How do you like my file sharing app? Ask HN: How do you like my social app for niche ? Ask HN: How do you like my twitter app? Ask HN: How do you like my facebook app? Ask HN: How do you like my iphone app? Ask HN: How do you like my facebook app that writes twitter apps? Ask HN: How do you like my game? Ask HN: How do you like my photo sharing app? Ask HN: How do you like my video sharing app? Ask HN: How do I monetize my free flashcard app? Ask HN: How do you like my app that helps other hackers to do ? Ask HN: How do I get traffic to my freemium app? Ask HN: How do I get angels/VCs interested? Ask HN: Look what I wrote this weekend! Ask HN: Look what I wrote in one night! Ask HN: Look what I wrote in 7 seconds! Customer 1: How can we sell through Amazon.com? Customer 2: How can we reduce inventory by $300 million? Customer 3: How can we increase conversion from 2% to 4%? Customer 4: How can we use software to reduce energy costs? Customer 5: How can we migrate one app into another? Customer 6: How can we get our phones to talk to our legacy apps? Customer 7: How can we take orders through the internet? Customer 8: How can we get our software package to do ? Customer 9: How can we reduce credit card fraud? Customer 10: How can we increase SEO effectiveness? Customer 11: How can we connect fulfillment and ecommerce? Customer 12: How can we increase revenue? Customers 13-200: How can we increase profitability? | edw519 | 196 | March 2011 | URL |
46 | drew from dropbox here. i hope you guys can give us the benefit of the doubt: when something pops up that encourages people to turn dropbox into the next rapidshare or equivalent (the title on HN was suggesting it could be the successor to torrents), you can imagine how that could ruin the service for everyone -- illegal file sharing has never been permitted and we take great pains to keep it off of dropbox. the internet graveyard is filled with services that didn't take this approach. so, when something like this gets called to our attention, we have to do something about it. note that this isn't even by choice -- if we don't take action, then we look like we are tacitly encouraging it. the point is not to censor or "kill" it (which is obviously impossible and would be idiotic for us to try to do), but we sent kindly worded emails to the author and other people who posted it to take it down for the good of the community so that we don't encourage an army of pirates to flock to dropbox, and they voluntarily did so. there were no legal threats or any other shenanigans to the author or people hosting -- we just want to spend all our time building a great product and not on cat-and-mouse games with people who try to turn dropbox into an illegal file sharing service against our wishes. (for what it's worth, dropship doesn't even work anymore -- we've fixed the deduplication behavior serverside to prevent "injection" of files you don't actually have, for a variety of reasons.) that said, when we disabled public sharing of that file by hash, it auto-generated an email saying we had received a DMCA takedown notice to the OP, which was incorrect and not what we intended to do, so i apologize to dan that this happened. (*edited the last paragraph: we didn't send a takedown notice, we sent a note saying that we received a DMCA takedown notice, which was also in error) | dhouston | 374 | April 2011 | URL |
47 | Osama bin Laden's legacy lives on with every traveler being herded through body scanners, with every illegal search in our 120-mile-radius Constitution-free zones, and with every warrantless wiretap. Until his legacy dies, he lives on, as strong as ever. ... Can I at least bring a tube of toothpaste with me when I travel now? | jrockway | 287 | May 2011 | URL |
48 | Hi Everyone, This is Sal here. I wanted to respond directly on the author's page, but they seem to be having a problem taking comments. The reason why I make history videos is that many people I know (many of whom are quite educated) don't even have a basic scaffold of world events in their minds (or the potential causality between events). Most American high school and college students would find it difficult to give even a summary of the Vietnam War or the Cuban Missile Crisis. Many of these people have sat through years of traditional history classes (taught through state-mandated books by "experts"). Even more worrying is many experts who have taken one side or another of a historical issue and view their viewpoints as facts (this is the tone of most history books). If the author really watched my videos, he would see that I start most of them telling the listener to be skeptical of anything I tell them or anyone tells them; that no matter how footnoted something is, in the end it is dependent on people's accounts--the people who weren't killed--which are subject to bias (no matter how well-intentioned). Very few history books or professors do this. If anything, they create a false sense of certainty. As for the "one voice" issue, I don't see how a guy making digestible videos that inform and encourage skepticism (on YouTube where anyone else can do the same) are more dangerous than state-mandated text books. I don't see how lectures that are open for the world to scrutinize (and comment about on YouTube and our site) are more dangerous than a lone teacher or professor who can say whatever they like to their classrooms with no one there to correct or dispute them. Finally, there is nothing I would like to see more than other teachers/professors/experts adding their voice to the mix. Rather than wasting energy commenting on other people's work with pseudo-intellectual babble, why don't they produce their own videos and post them on YouTube? If someone can produce 20 videos that seem decent and want to do more as part of the Khan Academy, we'll point our audience at them. If our students respond, we'll figure out a way that they can potentially make it a career. regards, Sal | salmankhan | 279 | June 2011 | URL |
49 | Hi Panos. I was actually a student in your class last fall semester. To alleviate any doubt you may have, the class was known as Info Tech, and you had two sessions on Mondays and Wednesdays (2-3:15, 3:30-4:45 pm) in KMEC. Now I have a couple of problems with your post. Firstly, you attribute your lower evaluation rating of 5.3 for last fall semester solely to your lower tolerance of cheating. However, there is something very wrong with this logic. As you may (or evidently, may not) know, correlation does not imply causation. In other words, your lower overall rating was not necessarily due to your increased surveillance of plagiarism; it could have been due to other factors. As someone who was a student in your class, I can speak for myself and say that I did give you a low rating, and it was NOT because you punished the cheatersit was far from it. To put it rather simply and bluntly, you were unkind (thats an extreme euphemism) out of the classroom. Sure, you had your favorites (my best friend being one of them) as most professors do. However, you had, what I perceived to be, an irrational disdain for some of your students, I being one of them. When I asked questions in class, youd quietly giggle or give me a blank stare as if the question I asked was completely stupid (forgive me, Im not technologically inclined), which of course discouraged me from participating in class. When I stayed after class to ask you questions I was too shy to ask in class, or to just discuss the subject material in greater depth, youd answer in a very short, annoyed tone, as if you had more important things to do. My thank yous went unanswered. My smiles to you were not reciprocated. Sure, it sounds silly, but it was very clear you did not like me. And I had no idea why. Some people noticed, while others in the class also felt like you hated them for no apparent reason. It got to the point where we, as well as others who experienced better treatment, discussed it and concluded you were just racist. Now, I know you and many others reading this post probably think Im just a pissed off student who didnt get the grade he wanted and is now bashing his teacher out of revenge. However, thats really not the case; I just figured Id give you my honest opinion of you seeing as your perception of your students mentality towards you is completely mistaken. Ill just quickly recount one experience that perfectly illustrates my overall experience with you. For the WiMax assignment (which is what your blog post is based on), after all the students had received your email demanding those who plagiarized to come in to talk to you, naturally everyone, even those who didnt cheat, felt very uneasy and worried. I, who collaborated with a friend on one small part of the assignment, got worried and came in to see you during office hours. When I arrived, there was one other student waiting in the seating area; she said you werent in your office. So we waited for a good 30 minutes until you came strolling in. She then went in to speak with you. About 20 minutes passed until she emerged. You then walked out, saw me, and then said Ill be back soon. 50 MINUTES ELAPSED, and you finally returned. You were munching on a sandwich. As you walked by me, you mumbled emergency. So, almost two hours after I had come to your office, I finally was able to speak with you. We went in, you looked up my assignment, and then you said theres no problem with your assignment; youre fine. So I left. There was no apology. Now, aside from me having a bad experience with you, what really irks me about your post is your complacence with cheating because its not in your self-interest to pursue those who cheated. A true capitalist at heart, I guess. As a student who did not cheat, worked very hard, and still received a relatively low grade in your class, theres nothing more infuriating. Is it not your job as an educator to make sure those who put in the most effort and demonstrate the highest level of achievement are awarded grades accordingly? Is it not your job to make sure the playing field is level, especially at a school where there is such a high pressure to do well as a result of a strict grading curve policy? I guess you dont believe so. I mean, after all, you did give my friend, who consistently received a B average on assignments and exams throughout the semester, an overall grade of A (which he was very, very shocked by). Anyway, that is not to say I did not learn a lot from your class. You were a great teacher inside the classroom. However, teaching evaluations dont just measure your ability to give good lectures; they are holistic--meaning, they also measure intangibles, such as the professor's willingness to help students, or his attitude. And that, Panos, is where you failed. | nyustern | 187 | July 2011 | URL |
50 | Please add [2005] to the title. You had my hopes up there for a moment. | aaronbrethorst | 257 | August 2011 | URL |
51 | "However, executives at Starz apparently concluded that they would lose even more money by giving consumers a reason to subscribe to Netflix instead of the cable channel." I don't think they get it. The landscape has changed and I'm not going back. I don't have cable. I don't have satelite. I don't have an antenna for broadcast TV. I have the Internet serving content to my TV via my Xbox, and I use it to watch Netflix. If your content isn't available on Netflix. I'm not consuming your content. Period. I'm done bending over backwards. I'm done with schedules. I'm done with managing the space on my DVR. I'm done keeping up with new episodes and seasons. I'm done with movie theaters full of loud other people who aren't me, and the litany of other issues that have been discussed to death from overpriced tickets, to concessions, to 3D projector woes and content. I'm done with physical media getting scratched. Hell, I'm even done with sketchy torrent sites, and different scene groups fighting over who gets to release what, and a billion codecs and formats. I'm done with it. I'm done. So frankly, good bye and good riddance to Starz. Go climb this hill and die upon it. I never liked the fact that their schizophrenic content releases would appear during a timed window, only to disappear from my list later before I actually got a chance to watch it. I grew to avoid movies labeled with the Starz logo, and my heart would sink when a feature would open with one, because I knew the experience was fleeting and I wouldn't be able to enjoy the content later. So I'm done with that too. | bittermang | 275 | September 2011 | URL |
52 | I did quit my full-time job. So did I. Many times. About half the time it worked out great. The other half, it sucked, just like yours does now. You are not alone. I'm constantly broke, on the verge of poverty... Then get a job, any job. It doesn't have to be programming. It'll get you out of the house, get you with other people, and put a few bucks in your pocket. If you love programming enough, you'll find time to keep it going on the side. I'm deeply depressed and contemplating suicide Don't. Contact me anytime (see my profile). When things are going well, they're never as good as they seem. When they are going poorly, they're never as bad as they seem. I have to constantly hear my father shout what an idiot I am for quitting a high-paying job Fathers are sometimes wrong. Yours is now. Don't listen to him. My friends make fun of me for making a retarded life decision. When things get tough, you find out who you're friends really are. I know it's not much consolation, but you just did. Be glad you saved a lot of time and energy. Anyone who makes fun of you was never your friend, just an acquaintence. I can't really do anything else, since apparently finding a new job, is kind of hard and I have to go through the whole step where I admit my failure and start over and I don't even know what I want anymore. Don't ever say "can't" because it's not true. You can. Just find any job and go from there. First you crawl, then you walk, then you run. Many of us have already been there. You can do it too. I thought I would become free, but I've actually become less free as a result of it. So far. What you don't see now since you are in the midst of this is that this was just one backward (or sideways) step in a long journey forward. I don't know anyone who is successful that had only forward steps. We have all had these backward steps. It sounds like this may have been your first big one. That might be why it hurts so much. I'm 20, I have no college diploma, no high school diploma, ... None of that matters. All that really matters is what's inside your head and your heart. Once you decide to start taking positive steps, you'll see. I'm an idiot, essentially. Please don't ever say that. You're not, and I have proof: If you were really an idiot, then you wouldn't have posted this here. It just didn't work out and it feels very painful. Thanks for the warning. You may have just saved a lot of people a lot of pain with this post. And thanks for your story. I have been there (several times) as I imagine many others here have as well. It gets better. I promise. But you have to stop feeling miserable and take a positive step. Posting here was your first step. Talking to some of us off-line may be another. And getting out of the house and finding a job, any job, is probably your next best step. Please give it a shot a keep us posted. We're not going anywhere and we care. Really. | edw519 | 336 | October 2011 | URL |
53 | You can tell someone hasn't spent much time at AfD, the section of Wikipedia where people (anyone in the world, really) discuss whether articles should be deleted, by the outrage they express at the "arbitrariness" of Wikipedia's notability rules. Have you spent any time at AfD? Let me help you out: here's the AfD log for the week they killed "Jessie_Stricchiola": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion... Deletions include: * The "vice editor in chief" of a Japanese anime magazine * A list of episodes for a TV show that never aired * Articles about a no-name iPhone game, and also a no-name video editing tool, presumably both written by the authors of the programs * A promo for a not-yet-released book * An article about "Rickstar", a musical artist who had apparently self-released one song * A strategy guide for The Sims 3 * A bio of a junior league hockey player (albeit one with an awesome name) * An article about a youth football team ... and it just keeps going on like that. This particular article was motivated by the deletion of "Jessie_Stricchiola". Let's look at her AfD: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion... Where we learn: * This is an article about an SEO consultant. * It contained a promotional link to the SEO consultant's book. * That SEO consultant had been quoted in a number of stories, but never written about in any of those stories; the only reliable information to be gleaned from any source about her was "once gave a quote about click fraud to a trade press journalist" (or in one case a reporter at WaPo). It took two weeks for Wikipedia to determine that this article should be deleted. During that entire time, her article stood with a very prominent notice saying it was going to be deleted, with a prominent link allowing people to argue in favor of keeping or, better yet, locate a real reliable source backing up any claim to her notability. Two weeks. Read the AfD. Read DGG's exegesis of the sources cited in this article --- the guy found out how many libraries carried her book . Now, think about this: Jessie's article wasn't a marquee deletion event. Nobody gave a shit. It was just one of many pages up for AfD that week, alongside the founder of a political party nobody has ever heard of and 3 members of non-professional football clubs. In every one of those retarded articles , someone had to marshall real arguments, chase down real sources, and in many cases defend those arguments against both bona fide Wikipedia contributors and also sockpuppets of the subjects of the article. Every time . Anyone who can snark that Wikipedia is a knee-jerk or arbitrary culture is betraying a deep ignorance of how the most successful Internet reference project in the history of the Internet actually works. Something I don't get about people on HN and their attitude towards Wikipedia. None of you, not a one, expects Linus Torvalds to accept arbitrary contributions to the Linux kernel simply because that code could be disabled by default and wasn't going to bother anyone (unlike a bogus Wikipedia article, which taints the encyclopedia and also Google search results). People with experimental or long-shot Linux contributions (at least, people besides ESR) tend to set up Github pages instead of writing long-winded rants about the "deletionism" rampant in the world's most successful open source project. But Wikipedia kills an article about an SEO consultant, and you're up in arms. Mostly, this comment I'm writing is just bitching . So, to repay you the kindness of reading my own windbag rant, I offer you this gift: THE VERY FEW SIMPLE RULES OF THUMB YOU WILL EVER NEED TO AVOID FRUSTRATION OVER THE "Deletionism" OF WIKIPEDIA: RULE NUMBER ONE: DO NOT WRITE WIKIPEDIA ARTICLES ABOUT YOURSELF, YOUR COMPANY, PROGRAMS THAT YOU WROTE, OR YOUR UNPUBLISHED SCI-FI NOVEL. RULE NUMBER TWO: IF YOU HAVE TO ASK, DO NOT WRITE WIKIPEDIA ARTICLES ABOUT YOUR FRIENDS, YOUR FRIENDS' COMPANIES, PROGRAMS THAT YOUR FRIENDS WROTE, OR YOUR FRIENDS UNPUBLISHED SCI-FI NOVEL. They should just put those two rules on the edit box on the site, I agree; would make everyone's life easier. | tptacek | 234 | November 2011 | URL |
54 | Let me tell you why you don't see this happening more often. I did this on a project a few years back. I replaced a paper workflow process that was taking up two people each in three departments with a web-based workflow that increased visibility, dropped turn-around time from days to minutes, increased accountability and accuracy and trimmed those 16 person hours of processing down to 1-2 per department. Everyone who directly interacted with the new system loved it. Numerous edge cases that would have been lost in high-level review were caught and integrated from day 1 due to my actually watching people do the job for a day or two per department. The solution has been rock solid (minor maintenance only) for five years. And I almost lost the job. The people who sign the checks were furious. The balance of political power between departments were thrown for a loop. One head in particular treated the thing as a near-existential threat. His entire concept of his job revolved around being the authoritative interface for retrieving and maintaining pieces of data that were no longer exclusively under his control. Another flipped out because middle management saw the results as cause to reduce his headcount and budget, and thus importance. These two departments fought for months, refusing to contribute their shares of budget that were pledged toward modernizing this system. On a technical and practical level, it was the single best experience I've ever had as a consultant. On a personal and economic level, is was one of the worst. It was some of the hardest money I've ever tried to collect. It was some of the most time and energy I've put into the political and 'sales' side of a job (the part I treat as a necessary evil, but very much evil). The corporation has made out like a bandit in the long run. But I paid the price. It's simply too easy and financially rewarding to allow a client's political nonsense to screw up every stage of a project. I have less stress, the people who pay me are happier and I bill far more hours. As with most software, internally developed software included, you don't see better projects more often because the incentives are horribly perverted and stacked against it. | roc | 168 | December 2011 | URL |
55 | There's some sleight of hand here. Not all the digits are exactly right. Look how it skips from 997 to 999: http://www.futilitycloset.com/2012/01/08/math-notes-76/ Here's the math. Suppose you want a unit fraction 1/n with decimals that cycle through the 4-digit sequence abcd. Multiply by 10^4 to shift abcd into integer position, leaving repeating copies after the decimal point: 10^4/n = abcd + 1/n Solving for n gives n = (10^4 - 1) / abcd. More generally, if you want to get a cycle equal to the d digits of an integer k, you want n = (10^d - 1) / k. However, this only gives a true unit fraction when k divides 10^d - 1, so that n is an integer. Otherwise you are forced to truncate n and getting an approximate version of the cycle. That's exactly what happened here: 10^d - 1 is not divisible by the integer 001002...998999. Here's a small Python program that will generate the unit fraction given the number of digits to cycle through: import sys n = int(sys.argv[1]) s = ''.join(("%0" + str(n) + "d") % (i,) for i in range(10**n)) print "1/%d" % ((10**len(s) - 1) / int(s),) Usage: $ python magic.py 3 1/998001 $ python magic.py 4 1/99980001 This has just the right flavor for a Project Euler problem. | psykotic | 220 | January 2012 | URL |
56 | Can I add to this one little point, which is a counterintuitive thing you can do to help your local library: Use your local library . During the year we started Matasano our Chicago team spent about 40%-50% of our time working from the Oak Park Public Library, sometimes in meeting rooms we booked, more often at study desks. It was great. The Internet access wasn't amazing but it was totally functional and we could VPN out through it. The desks and working space were if anything better than what we have now (and we really like our office). There were times I worried that we were being a burden, but the impression I get is that it's the opposite. What's deadly for a local library is for nobody from the community to be using it, for it to have no stakeholders from the tax base of the community. The library staff was always welcoming to us. Your hip coffee shop on the other hand hates you with a passion it normally reserves for Scott Stapp solo albums. At the coffee shop, you take up space in a business that's driven by turnover. Someone's going to chime in here with a story about a coffee shop that truly loves the startups that park themselves at their tables and order 3 count them 3 cups of coffee in a day, but I've talked to hipster coffee shop people oh-yes-I-have and at least some of you who truly believe you're doing your coffee shop a favor are being tolerated gracefully, not welcomed, like you would be at your local library. Libraries have an obvious role to grow into as IT hubs for their communities, now that so much of their knowledge-disseminating role has been subsumed by IT. But another related less obvious role is as a hub for local entrepreneurship; thing thing "hackerspaces" are supposed to do, but are (for so many companies) suboptimal at. | tptacek | 167 | February 2012 | URL |
57 | There is something chillingly unconvincing about their attempts at informality. Big Brother jokey is a lot more frightening than Big Brother bureaucratic or Big Brother bombastic. Too bad this insight wasn't available to Orwell or he could have made 1984 even scarier. | pg | 257 | March 2012 | URL |
58 | A glass of water can be worth more than the New York Times if Zuckerberg is lost in the desert and you happen to have water. It can be worth even more if Larry Page is dying of thirst at the same time and starts a bidding war. | kirubakaran | 264 | April 2012 | URL |
59 | I really, really disagree with Jeff Atwood here. Jeff has interpreted "learn to code" with "become a programmer". They're not the same thing. I don't think that is what this meme is about at all. Programming is logical thinking in practise. Programming is breaking a problem set down, thinking step by step through it, thinking of edge cases, and making it work. There is nothing wrong with Jeff's BASIC example, if that is where the mayor of NYC ends up. There was once a time when books were only read and written by an elite group. Now everyone can read - and everyone can write. There are still the elite authors that write better than the rest of us. Just because everyone can write, doesn't mean everyone is trying to be a professional author. Computers are a part of society. To function well in society, it's beneficial to understand a little about how they work, and how to make them do things. The essence of programming is making a computer do something more efficiently than you can. Programming isn't just the advanced stuff - recursion, pointers, functional programming, or whatever. Maybe Jeff is too far down the rabbit hole to realise this, but most people don't know what programming even looks like . They don't know how we tell computers to do the things they do. Recently I was with a customer, making notes about changes I needed to make to their application. They asked me "Is that how you make it do that?". No - that was my TODO file. And these are people that work on computers all day, every day. It's beneficial if marketing folk understand the basics of programming when they're doing web ads. It's useful that CAD engineers know the basics so they can automate AutoCAD. Its useful that financial accountants know basic programming so they can become more efficient with analysing data. If the mayor of NYC wants to learn to program in his spare time, why the hell not? I bet there wouldn't be the same complaints if he wanted to learn how to surf. edit: grammar | jkahn | 260 | May 2012 | URL |
60 | Some observations on this file: 0. This is a file of SHA1 hashes of short strings (i.e. passwords). 1. There are 3,521,180 hashes that begin with 00000. I believe that these represent hashes that the hackers have already broken and they have marked them with 00000 to indicate that fact. Evidence for this is that the SHA1 hash of 'password' does not appear in the list, but the same hash with the first five characters set to 0 is. 5baa61e4c9b93f3f0682250b6cf8331b7ee68fd8 is not present 000001e4c9b93f3f0682250b6cf8331b7ee68fd8 is present Same story for 'secret': e5e9fa1ba31ecd1ae84f75caaa474f3a663f05f4 is not present 00000a1ba31ecd1ae84f75caaa474f3a663f05f4 is present And for 'linkedin': 7728240c80b6bfd450849405e8500d6d207783b6 is not present 0000040c80b6bfd450849405e8500d6d207783b6 is present 2. There are 2,936,840 hashes that do not start with 00000 that can be attacked with JtR. 3. The implication of #1 is that if checking for your password and you have a simple password then you need to check for the truncated hash. 4. This may well actually be from LinkedIn. Using the partial hashes (above) I find the hashes for passwords linkedin, LinkedIn, L1nked1n, l1nked1n, L1nk3d1n, l1nk3d1n, linkedinsecret, linkedinpassword, ... 5. The file does not contain duplicates. LinkedIn claims a user base of 161m. This file contains 6.4m unique password hashes. That's 25 users per hash. Given the large amount of password reuse and poor password choices it is not improbable that this is the complete password file. Evidence against that thesis is that password of one person that I've asked is not in the list. | jgrahamc | 201 | June 2012 | URL |
61 | Thank GOD they're disrupting this industry. All the telcos are worthless "Soviet bureaus" that deserve death. It's really sort of amazing to think about. In all my years on this planet I have never been pleased with a telecom company. Never. I have always felt like I was paying far too much for inferior service, contemptible customer support, and endless efforts to further "monetize" me through harassing phone calls trying to sell me more stuff, intrusive DNS systems that redirect me to their crappy web sites, etc. There is not a single other industry I can say that about, certainly not one that comes to mind so quickly. Hell, I can't even say that about the government. As if that's not bad enough, this industry seems to spend a lot of money lobbying to destroy the open Internet, which is like a car company lobbying to increase the number of annoying traffic regulations in order to make it less enjoyable to drive. | api | 264 | July 2012 | URL |
62 | It's a genuine problem and has been growing gradually worse for a while. I think the cause is simply growth. When a good community grows, it becomes worse in two ways: (a) more recent arrivals don't have as much of whatever quality distinguished the original members, and (b) the large size of the group makes people behave worse, because there is more anonymity in a larger group. I've spent many hours over the past several years trying to understand and mitigate such problems. I've come up with a bunch of tweaks that worked, and I have hopes I'll be able to come up with more. The idea I'm currently investigating, in case anyone is curious, is that votes rather than comments may be the easiest place to attack this problem. Although snarky comments themselves are the most obvious symptom, I suspect that voting is on average dumber than commenting, because it requires so much less work. So I'm going to try to see if it's possible to identify people who consistently upvote nasty comments and if so count their votes less. | pg | 272 | August 2012 | URL |
63 | Am I the only one who hasn't noticed this huge drop in quality that has everyone bitching and moaning lately? The signal-to-noise ratio has dropped slightly compared to when I started reading about four years ago, but this is still a great place for technical discussion. Comparisons to Reddit and other such nonsense are baseless. HN does not need any major overhaul or whatever else. I think a lot of this is just old-timers starting to see the same shit over and again. Try giving it up for a few months, then come back and see if you still feel that way. One thing that has happened, that I suspect may have ruffled some feathers, is that HN is not the objectivist echo chamber it used to be. This is still a board for entrepreneurs before it is a board for hackers, but some of the more out-there John Galt type stuff will now get picked apart and downvoted, or even just ignored, where before you either clucked your tongue in agreement, remained silent, or donned your flame suit. | bluedanieru | 186 | September 2012 | URL |
64 | Conceptually, I love every bit of bad Zynga news. I like to be reassured that a company will, in the long term, fail when its products are cynically designed to manipulate. That a company will fail when their strategy assumes it's okay to blatantly, consistently, continuously lift design from other firms and products. Practically, though, bad Zynga news feels terrible . Because the guys who architected this repugnant exploitation machine already got paid . They made millions selling their stock before the market truly understood what a shit business they were running. Meanwhile, front-line employees sat with their plummeting stock locked up. So any bad Zynga news is nothing more than notice that yet another group of hardworking folks is, somehow, getting fucked over, despite their leadership enjoying tremendous rewards. Very frustrating to watch. | danilocampos | 233 | October 2012 | URL |
65 | This is empty madness. It is, very literally, a celebration of total materialism. What is ultimately important in life are people -- messy, filthy, bacteria-and-disease-laden, imperfect, emotional, sweating shitting cursing crying screaming laughing farting people and the connections we build to them. This celebration of spending insane amounts of time choosing the perfect flatware or the perfect wallet is sick. Steve Jobs spent eight years discussing furniture with his family before buying a sofa etc ( http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/14/111114fa_fact_... ). I will never do that, and I will never have flatware as nice as Dustin Curtis', and I will never have sound as good as an obsessive audiophile, or the perfect car. I won't even write a particularly convincing Hacker News comment on this very topic. I've got to go. Life is too short for this shit. | mapgrep | 397 | November 2012 | URL |
66 | A few points to help put this in context: 1. Technically, the USPTO hasn't yet "invalidated" the patent; it issued a first "Office action" in which it stated that all of the patents claims were unpatentable in view of varying combinations of prior-art references. 2. Institutionally the USPTO is very much aware of the significance of reexamination for a patent in litigation. 3. The Office action was signed by a "primary" examiner, i.e., someone who has been around the block a few times. Another primary examiner and a supervisory primary examiner are listed as "conferees." You would be right to read this as a signal that the USPTO takes these matters very seriously; the detailed written analysis (which I haven't studied) seems to bear this out. 4. The primary reference cited is a patent [1] filed in November 2005 whose lead inventor was Danny Hillis --- dare I say, the legendary Danny Hillis [2]. Another main reference is a Japanese patent publication from 2000, referred to as the Nomura reference. 5. In responding to the rejection, Apple can try to establish that their inventors predated Hillis's November 2005 filing date. This is referred to as "swearing behind" the Hillis patent's filing date [3]. But the Apple inventors' filing date is January 2007; swearing behind that far would be a real challenge. (I won't go into the details of the statute and regulation unless people are interested.) Apple can't swear behind the 2000 Nomura publication because it was published more than one year before Apple's January 2007 filing date --- see 35 USC 102(b). 6. Paragraph 14 on page 34 is pretty typical: It says, in effect, "you'd better take your best shot at contesting this rejection now , Apple, because the next time around it will be a final rejection." 7. If, as seems likely, the USPTO does issue a final rejection, Apple can appeal, first to an administrative appellate body in the USPTO, and if necessary to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The Federal Circuit is required by Supreme Court precedent to be fairly deferential to the USPTO's findings in some respects, but it's not entirely clear to me how that would play out here. [EDITED FOR STYLE] [1] http://www.google.com/patents/US7724242 [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Daniel_Hillis [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swear_back_of_a_reference | dctoedt | 230 | December 2012 | URL |
67 | I can speak quite a bit about this "industry": We (VLC) receive 1 of those offers per day. They are liars, shady business, IP violators and are downright dangerous. They have all those great offers for you, but they refuse to give any details as soon as you ask any question. More than half of them are "the biggest in the world" (sic). They lie about download numbers, about download size, about number of software actually installed and about their connexions. They even lie on the actual payback price. If you refuse, they build special websites, copying yours, with your IP and trademark and register adwords with your name, in every way possible. They also resell their solutions/websites to other people, using "Affiliate networks", so that once you take one down, 20 appear. And the guy who you took down had no idea who you were or what the software was... They also have deals with download.com/softopedia/softonic to change/rewrap your installer, without your agreement, often violating your license; or they give back money to those websites, so they are ranked higher than normal other downloads. And of course, open source software are never respected. I believe OP is very polite: There are no good reasons to not shame them publicly. | jbk | 407 | January 2013 | URL |
68 | Wow. I was as skeptical of the wisdom of Tesla attacking NYT's journalist for their Model S review as all the other HNers - but this is incredible. First: I realize the fact that what the hardware logs show and what the user was shown may not be one and the same (i.e. hardware sensors may indicate charge at 28% but due to a bug (it's possible!) it may be shown to be full). But their travel logs shred, I repeat, shred Broder's credibility and claims alike. It really does look like he was hell-bent on ripping Tesla a new one in his review. Taking Tesla's rebuttal at face value: purposely embarking on journeys over twice the indicated available range, driving around in circles in an empty parking lot to kill batteries, turning up the heat and claiming to have turned it down ("shaking, shivering, and with white knuckles" no less). They post images, graphs, logs, maps, and more. I'm incredibly surprised at how well they're defending themselves against dishonest reviews - for example, I'd never have thought to log the changes to the cabin temperature, but apparently they've done so and more! This post makes me want to reconsider a Model S as my next car. As far as I'm concerned, this is exactly the kind of attention to detail I want going into the engineering, design, and manufacture of my vehicle. I'd be interested in hearing NYT's response to this - they previously stated unconditionally that they stand by Broder's review and believe it to be honest, truthful, and factual. If indeed at the end of the day this was Broder pushing his own agenda, not only ignoring but outright faking facts, then I think his journalistic career should be over. | ComputerGuru | 278 | February 2013 | URL |
69 | I would also like a response from Sendgrid here. Somebody they sent to a conference, who was representing their company there, went on a personal vendetta against somebody and got them fired. That's awful, and I join the people I see online right now in saying that I cannot, in good conscience, ever do business with a company that supports that behavior. --And to how far Adria has set back womens' rights here-- The common thread I've seen from the women I've worked with in tech has been that they really just wish people didn't even notice their gender. They don't want to get treated like "a girl", they just want to get treated like "a person". What Adria has done here is made sure that people in tech are always hyper aware if they're working with one of the "outsiders" that she has cast herself as. It's really sad. (This comment is also worth reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5407884 ) | blhack | 349 | March 2013 | URL |
70 | Success is not validation of an idea and we should be ashamed to think so. Cigarettes are one of the most successful consumer products on earth. Inhaling a lungful of carcinogenic smoke several hundred times a day is undoubtedly a stupid idea. Tobacco has made a small number of people incomprehensibly rich, to the great detriment of humanity. Personally, I think nearly all of these 'social' startups are bad news. Not as bad news as a lung cancer epidemic, but bad news nonetheless. I think they feed a culture of passivity and attention deficit. I think they fragment human interaction into the smallest possible dopamine-inducing units. I think they're essentially Skinner boxes in disguise - apps that dress up an intermittent schedule of reward as meaningful activity. The startup culture talks the talk about "changing the world", but in truth most of us couldn't care less so long as we get our next funding round. For every Watsi, we have a hundred bullshit companies with bullshit products, providing yet another means of idle distraction for indolent westerners. We can hardly distinguish between what is worthwhile and what is popular or profitable. It has hardly occurred to Curtis or anyone in these comments that an idea could be both successful and stupid. Is Pinterest really an innovative sharing tool, or is it merely a collaborative exercise in commodity fetishism? Is Vine really a radical new way to communicate, or is it merely the nadir of audiovisual culture, fragmenting the world into six-second shards of nothingness? Do we even care? | jdietrich | 312 | April 2013 | URL |
71 | Back in the original dot-com bubble, I worked at a place that had the most amazing coffee machine I've ever seen. It was the size of a Coke machine and made ten thousand varieties of boutique coffee, most of which I'd never even heard of, all made to your specifications. It was incredible. Then one day a guy came in with a hand cart, loaded the coffee machine on it, and rolled it away. A week later the layoffs started. The lesson here isn't that there's something intangible or magic about free sodas or coffee. It's that when you used to give out free sodas and coffee, and then you stop , you're telling everyone in the company that business isn't as good as it used to be. Beverages are an easy thing for the bean-counters to get approval to cut, so when times get tough, they get cut first. But they're also a small line item, so while they're the first thing to get cut, they're usually not the last. In other words, the free sodas are the proverbial canary in the coal mine. When they die, it's time to get out if you don't want to die with them. This is why, when I visit clients these days, I make a point of going with them to their break room to get some coffee before our meeting starts. If their beverage situation has been upgraded since my last visit, they're doing well. If it's been downgraded, I know to be on guard for bean-counters coming after my relationship with them. | smacktoward | 198 | May 2013 | URL |
72 | Public spaces, aka the commons, is where all of society's problems manifest. Homeless people sleeping on buses is caused by, wait for it, homelessness. Not free buses. Sex workers turning tricks in public bathrooms is caused by, wait for it, prostitution being illegal. Crazy stinky people accosting people in public are caused by, wait for it, kicking mentally ill people to curb to fend for themselves. Freeride zones and public toilets are currently impractical. Because they're being sabotaged by larger issues. But they're still good ideas, both empirically and morally. | specialist | 256 | June 2013 | URL |
73 | Theres this great story from the book Art and Fear, that's very appropriate here: === The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the quantity group: 50 pounds of pots rated an A, 40 pounds a B, and so on. Those being graded on quality, however, needed to produce only one pot albeit a perfect one to get an A. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the quantity group was busily churning out piles of work-and learning from their mistakes the quality group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay. === Advance congratulations to Jennifer. This is amazing. | sivers | 447 | July 2013 | URL |
74 | The land of the free. As I read more and more of those stories I can't help but wonder at how things changed. I am from a formerly-eastern-europe-soviet-bloc country (Poland) and these kinds of oppressive techniques sound very familiar. The haziness of procedures, lack of basic rights, intimidation, no accountability of state officials -- we've seen all that until 1989. At the time, while the communist regime was imposed on us, the USA seemed like heaven: transparency, procedures, basic rights, free speech, accountable officials. Look at where we are today. I can't even imagine being held captive without arrest for hours, being questioned about the purpose of my trip, about my religion and habits, all while travelling within my country. When entering the country, the passport clerk has exactly two options: let me in, or call the police and get me arrested on the spot. I feel free and I am happy to live in a free country, together with people who because of the past oppressive Soviet regime are quite sensitive to abuses of power. At the same time, the U.S. is rapidly degenerating into something that isn't quite the sinister oppressive regime, but getting close to the point where it could become one, if a wrong leader gets elected. It's scary. And the worst thing is -- American people got so used to the idea of living in a free country, that they do not even admit the thought that things are going the wrong way. Most people don't see the signs. | jwr | 385 | August 2013 | URL |
75 | The other commenters are being too nice in their replies. You're full of shit. JustFab is a shoe of the month club masquerading as a normal online shoe store. The VIP Membership Program is the essence of JustFab's business model and yet it's missing entirely from the home page of their site. It looks like any other shoe store. And yet you think it's clear that the user is being signed up for a shoe of the month membership when they originally clicked through to buy a single pair of shoes. The entire checkout process is engineered to get people to sign up for the "VIP Membership Program" without realizing what it is. If they wanted to be up front about it, they'd explain it on the home page. They'd include it in the list of items that you're purchasing. They'd include the relevant terms (not just a link to them) on the page where you enter your credit card information. They'd put the terms higher on the page so that you're more likely to read them. They'd put the "Checkout as a regular member" link next to the "normal" checkout button and they'd make it just as big. And they'd make it a button. They don't do any of these things. When a user goes to checkout of any online store, they're not going to read everything on every page. It's a process they're very familiar with so they're going to skim and click through quickly. I know this, you know this, and JustFab knows this. That's why the program details are listed on the first page of the checkout process and not the last. That's why they're listed on a page where the user has but one action to take. Click the big pink button and get on with the checkout process. JustFab is not an awesome company as you claim. It is a scam and you are a horrible investor for investing in them. | avalaunch | 676 | September 2013 | URL |
76 | Well now he's got the founder of CD Baby on board, too. This is amazing. This is exactly what I would have created if I didn't sign a non-compete agreement when I sold CD Baby. I just created an unlimited account on DistroKid and I'm uploading all of my own music in the background as I type. I'll be sending everyone I know to DistroKid now. Congrats, Pud! You rule. | sivers | 274 | October 2013 | URL |
77 | Hey, other comments are going to give you a few lines telling you to not quit, that you should hang in there, and that it'll be alright. That may be true, but to me it sounds like you're possibly not doing well enough to make any of that possible, and you probably need to find work fast. Here's what I want to do: 1. I have a little list of companies looking for employees that I'll send you. Not much just companies that have contacted me looking for people.\n2. I am a bad ass writer and have a crazy resume, but more importantly I know how to craft resumes and I'll look at yours and help you fix it up.\n3. If you're in the San Francisco area I'll meet up with you and listen to what happened and see if there's a way to work out of it, or at least listen.\n4. If you email me at help@learncodethehardway.org I'll talk with you and see if there's other ways I can help. I'm serious, hit me up on email and I'll help out if I can. In fact, this goes for anyone else looking for work right now. Email the above and I'll reply with my little list. I don't make commissions on placement or anything like that, just a good thing to do. | zedshaw | 1081 | November 2013 | URL |
78 | We're investigating this now. | Matt_Cutts | 273 | December 2013 | URL |
79 | The pattern will break down once you get past 8192, which is 2^13. That means that the pattern continues for an impressive 52 significant figures (well, it actually breaks down on the 52nd digit, which will be a 3 instead of a 2). The reason it works is that 9998 = 10^4 - 2. You can expand as 1 / (10^n - 2) = 1/10^n * 1/(1 - 2/10^n)\n = 1/10^n * (1 + 2/10^n + 2^2 /10^2n + 2^3 /10^3n + ...)\n \nwhich gives the observed pattern. It breaks down when 2^k has more than n digits, which happens approximately when 2^k > 10^n => k > n log(10) / log(2)\n \nwhich comes out to 4 * log(10)/log(2) = 13.28 when n = 4. --- Another pattern can be generated from the power series expansion x / (1 - x)^2 = x + 2x^2 + 3x^3 + 4x^4 + ...\n \nsetting x = 1/10^n gives the infinite series 1/10^n + 2/10^2n + 3/10^3n + ...\n \nwhich leads to the neat fact that 1 / 998001 = 0.000 001 002 003 004 005 006 007...\n \n--- Another example is the fraction 1000 / 997002999 = 0.000 001 003 006 010 015 021 ...\n \nwhich goes through the triangle numbers[0] in its expansion, or 1 / 998999 = 0.000 001 001 002 003 005 008 013 021 ...\n \nwhich goes through the Fibonacci numbers[1]. --- Getting the squares is harder, but you can do it with 1001000 / 997002999 = 0.001 004 009 016 025 036 049 ...\n\n \n[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_number [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_number | crntaylor | 282 | January 2014 | URL |
80 | As the main developer of VLC, we know about this story since a long time, and this is just Dell putting crap components on their machine and blaming others. Any discussion was impossible with them. So let me explain a bit... In this case, VLC just uses the Windows APIs (DirectSound), and sends signed integers of 16bits (s16) to the Windows Kernel. VLC allows amplification of the INPUT above the sound that was decoded. This is just like replay gain, broken codecs, badly recorded files or post-amplification and can lead to saturation. But this is exactly the same if you put your mp3 file through Audacity and increase it and play with WMP, or if you put a DirectShow filter that amplifies the volume after your codec output.\nFor example, for a long time, VLC ac3 and mp3 codecs were too low (-6dB) compared to the reference output. At worse, this will reduce the dynamics and saturate a lot, but this is not going to break your hardware. VLC does not (and cannot) modify the OUTPUT volume to destroy the speakers. VLC is a Software using the OFFICIAL platforms APIs. The issue here is that Dell sound cards output power (that can be approached by a factor of the quadratic of the amplitude) that Dell speakers cannot handle. Simply said, the sound card outputs at max 10W, and the speakers only can take 6W in, and neither their BIOS or drivers block this. And as VLC is present on a lot of machines, it's simple to blame VLC. "Correlation does not mean causation" is something that seems too complex for cheap Dell support... Maybe Dell should advise against playing Metal music and should only allow Céline Dion music, because Metal saturates more... EDIT: more details... PS: they even provide a BIOS update for the fix... So, of course, VLC was the issue... http://www.dell.com/support/troubleshooting/us/en/04/KCS/Kcs... | jbk | 436 | February 2014 | URL |
81 | As I type this comment, most other comments are pointing out how a 6th grader got this wrong, by failing to suggest the "correct" solution of abandoning printing. I don't... how do I put this nicely. This is a kid. He is smart. He looked at the problem from a new angle. He came up with a nice hack. Presumably we want more kids with more of a hacking spirit. I hope he doesn't read Hacker News. | 6cxs2hd6 | 431 | March 2014 | URL |
82 | I am a strong supporter of gay marriage, but I have to say that I find this very unfortunate and worrying. Apparently many Mozilla supporters seem to think it is okay to bully a qualified person out of his job only for his political views, even if they had absolutely no effect on his qualification or his actions on the job. I can't help but feel like this campaign has done a lot more harm to him than his $1000 donation could have ever done to anyone. | DangerousPie | 292 | April 2014 | URL |
83 | I felt obliged to comment because I feel I know what you are talking about and I also worry that much of the advice posted so far is wrong at best, dangerous at worst. I am 42-year-old very successful programmer who has been through a lot of situations in my career so far, many of them highly demotivating. And the best advice I have for you is to get out of what you are doing. Really. Even though you state that you are not in a position to do that, you really are. It is okay. You are free. Okay, you are helping your boyfriend's startup but what is the appropriate cost for this? Would he have you do it if he knew it was crushing your soul? I don't use the phrase "crushing your soul" lightly. When it happens slowly, as it does in these cases, it is hard to see the scale of what is happening. But this is a very serious situation and if left unchecked it may damage the potential for you to do good work for the rest of your life. Reasons: * The commenters who are warning about burnout are right. Burnout is a very serious situation. If you burn yourself out hard, it will be difficult to be effective at any future job you go to, even if it is ostensibly a wonderful job. Treat burnout like a physical injury. I burned myself out once and it took at least 12 years to regain full productivity. Don't do it. * More broadly, the best and most creative work comes from a root of joy and excitement. If you lose your ability to feel joy and excitement about programming-related things, you'll be unable to do the best work. That this issue is separate from and parallel to burnout! If you are burned out, you might still be able to feel the joy and excitement briefly at the start of a project/idea, but they will fade quickly as the reality of day-to-day work sets in. Alternatively, if you are not burned out but also do not have a sense of wonder, it is likely you will never get yourself started on the good work. * The earlier in your career it is now, the more important this time is for your development. Programmers learn by doing. If you put yourself into an environment where you are constantly challenged and are working at the top threshold of your ability, then after a few years have gone by, your skills will have increased tremendously. It is like going to intensively learn kung fu for a few years, or going into Navy SEAL training or something. But this isn't just a one-time constant increase. The faster you get things done, and the more thorough and error-free they are, the more ideas you can execute on, which means you will learn faster in the future too. Over the long term, programming skill is like compound interest. More now means a LOT more later. Less now means a LOT less later. So if you are putting yourself into a position that is not really challenging, that is a bummer day in and day out, and you get things done slowly, you aren't just having a slow time now. You are bringing down that compound interest curve for the rest of your career. It is a serious problem. If I could go back to my early career I would mercilessly cut out all the shitty jobs I did (and there were many of them). One more thing, about personal identity. Early on as a programmer, I was often in situations like you describe. I didn't like what I was doing, I thought the management was dumb, I just didn't think my work was very important. I would be very depressed on projects, make slow progress, at times get into a mode where I was much of the time pretending progress simply because I could not bring myself to do the work. I just didn't have the spirit to do it. (I know many people here know what I am talking about.) Over time I got depressed about this: Do I have a terrible work ethic? Am I really just a bad programmer? A bad person? But these questions were not so verbalized or intellectualized, they were just more like an ambient malaise and a disappointment in where life was going. What I learned, later on, is that I do not at all have a bad work ethic and I am not a bad person. In fact I am quite fierce and get huge amounts of good work done, when I believe that what I am doing is important . It turns out that, for me, to capture this feeling of importance, I had to work on my own projects (and even then it took a long time to find the ideas that really moved me). But once I found this, it basically turned me into a different person. If this is how it works for you, the difference between these two modes of life is HUGE. Okay, this has been long and rambling. I'll cut it off here. Good luck. | jblow | 232 | May 2014 | URL |
84 | Hi all, I'm a maintainer of Docker. As others already indicated this doesn't work on 1.0. But it could have . Please remember that at this time, we don't claim Docker out-of-the-box is suitable for containing untrusted programs with root privileges. So if you're thinking "pfew, good thing we upgraded to 1.0 or we were toast", you need to change your underlying configuration now. Add apparmor or selinux containment, map trust groups to separate machines, or ideally don't grant root access to the application. Docker will soon support user namespaces, which is a great additional security layer but also not a silver bullet! When we feel comfortable saying that Docker out-of-the-box can safely contain untrusted uid0 programs, we will say so clearly. | shykes | 265 | June 2014 | URL |
85 | (There's a shout-out to HN in the article.) Two years ago, HN was the first to pick up on a post I wrote about my son's preliminary diagnosis via experimental exome sequencing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4038113 Two years ago, he was the only known NGLY1 deficient patient in the world. By spreading the story, we've found 16 cases worldwide. We've organized. We've found preliminary treatments. Clinical trials are in the pipeline. In some cases, we've saved the lives of previously undiagnosed patients. And, these children's cells are turning into gold mines for the basic science of glycobiology. From the bottom of my heart and on behalf of the entire small but optimistic NGLY1 community, Thank you. | mattmight | 445 | July 2014 | URL |
86 | I've been mystified how Uber's kept up their "Underdog" mantle for as long as they have. They've raised over $1.5B in investment from some of the biggest companies, private equity firms, and VCs on earth. I think you stop being an underdog as soon as Goldman Sachs, Blackrock, TPG, KPCB, Google, and Jeff Bezos are invested in your success. They likely have more cash-on-hand than the cumulative Taxi base they are 'disrupting', they've been caught multiple times sabotaging competitors, they've been outed for dishonest advertising, and have been repeatedly accused of hostile actions toward their drivers. They ignore sensible regulations like maximum hourly workweeks and insurance minimums (do you want your driver working 90hrs/week without liability insurance?) under the guise of fighting the taxi cartel. It often takes a 'push' to get bad laws changed, and Uber's provided much of that push, but not all laws that restrain business are bad and not all companies that break bad laws are good. | mikeyouse | 249 | August 2014 | URL |
87 | This is nothing compared to what allegedly happened to QWest. When the US Government was forcing telecom by telecom to install taps into their business's core routing hubs Joseph Nacchio, the CEO at the time, dug his heels in demanding legal avenues to avoid turning his back on QWest's customers. The US threatened to pull out large contracts that made up a large part of QWest's business. Furthermore, having been served a National Security Letter, Nacchio was not able to speak to his company or shareholders about the situation. Nacchio continued to insist on legal avenues and Uncle Sam did exactly what it threatened. Nacchio warned major stakeholders that all of the major QWest contracts were about to go belly up. The US government threw Nacchio in prison for insider trading. Oh and then QWest went bankrupt and was bought by competitor CenturyLink (who presumably had fewer difficulties complying). Sometimes the market has more than one invisible hand. Edit: A good point by a fellow commentor - no independent investigation has been performed into the QWest story. I looked but could not find FOIA information online. | xnull | 205 | September 2014 | URL |