Ask HN: What's your favorite HN post?
Been asked several times but interested to see references to more recent posts.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2158116 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3996652
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2158116 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3996652
- #define CTO - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8516777
- Ask HN: The “I want to do everything but end up doing nothing” dilemma - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9049208
- Ask HN: How to Be a Good Technical Lead? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10395046
- Ask HN: When you feel stuck in life - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12143266
- How to stop feeling lonely - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7044690
- We only hire the trendiest - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11326940
- The days are long but the decades are short (my personal favourite post and comments all the time) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9454440- #define CTO - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8516777
- Ask HN: The “I want to do everything but end up doing nothing” dilemma - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9049208
- Ask HN: How to Be a Good Technical Lead? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10395046
- Ask HN: When you feel stuck in life - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12143266
- How to stop feeling lonely - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7044690
- We only hire the trendiest - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11326940
- The days are long but the decades are short - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9454440
Could you please confirm if this is the same one?
- Ask HN: What's left for early startup engineers as the company grows? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8881811
- How I wrote a self-hosting C compiler in 40 days - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10731002
- Who Y Combinator Companies Want - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10698009
- Why I quit my dream job at Ubisoft - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10953381
- Ask HN: How do I start being a consultant? (Thomas's comment there is gold!) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4245960
- Request For Research: Basic Income - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10982340&utm_term=comme...
So, you're gonna code the whole thing, do the servers and work for sweat equity...
anamax 8 years ago comments
If they don't have the money to pay you, you're not an employee, you're a founder and you get the same deal that they get.
If they balk, suggest that they find another code monkey while you find another biz monkey and let the market decide who ends up with the bananas.
Yes, you can't trust the good biz monkeys.
Yes, you can't trust the good biz monkeys.
Pretty sure that person is sociopathic - at least borderline.
Thank you, I think I needed to hear this. The person I'm talking to seems exactly like this. While I want to be working on important problems (hell if not important, atleast 'cool' ones), they just want a money making 'thing'.
I've been mulling for a while on how to go ahead with it, but this has made me more than certain our wavelengths do not match even though he's great at connections and selling hard.
I know I can put my faith into that particular person for some specifics such as writing business research and collecting market data, for example. But I could not, for example, leave my computer unlocked with that person. Nor would I use their internet connection to do bank stuff. Nor would I discuss certain things in certain rooms of their house. Some things I'm paranoid for, others not. The point is, some people need to be kept in check ;)
"RapGenius Growth Hack Exposed" basically solidified the effectiveness of using HN as a complaints forum: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6956658
Ask HN: Just got an innocent man out of prison. What now? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12010760
Aaron Swartz's initial appeal for help: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4529484
And the difficult discussion when someone pointed out that thread after his death: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5056279
I enjoyed this discussion on Margaret Hamilton, particularly because it for me epitomizes how anonymous the comments usually are. I remember reading Peter Norvig's comment about working with her and thinking, "Wow, this HN user must be pretty senior" before I looked at the username https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8735912
edit: In terms of recent, this discussion about "Strange bug workarounds" was just a day ago but had a lot of great laughs in it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12476855
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9048947
( - "If I'd still been working on networking at the time, that never would have happened. But I was off doing stuff for a startup called Autodesk."
- "Are you John Nagle, or was that a quote?" )
That one particular dropbox comment exemplifies why a large portion of the tech crowd is generally clueless about UX, and about the impact of UX on a product.
It exemplifies why Linux is having such a hard time being relevant on the desktop. Why a technically-superior product will not necessarily win over a well-marketed one. Why ideas and implementations don't matter, execution is key.
It's beautiful and enraging at the same time.
Ironically these criticisms are largely thrown at consumer apps, while server apps (eg third party monitoring and reporting) rarely cop it at the same level.
A recent example that comes to mind - I'm not affiliated and tbf plenty of comments point out valid use cases - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10289673
Yeah... that would have been a lot easier than Dropbox!
First thing I thought of.
About five years ago I imported a kilo of "Neotame" sweetener from a chem factory in Shanghai...> ...a small cloud of powder erupted in front of me and a hazy layer of the stuff settled over the kitchen. Eyes burning and some mild choking from inhaling the cloud, I instantly marveled at how unbelievably sweet the air tasted, and it was delicious.
> ...about 12g of personal (somewhat heavy) usage for two people in that time. Probably nowhere near the LD50.
What a relief! It is probably unlikely to kill half your family.
Which lead to the famous "Erlang Day", making the HN homepage look like this: https://www.flickr.com/photos/stilist/3348380060/in/photostr...
Interestingly, this day is what personally introduced me to Erlang, and it's been my primary programming language since.
Is pg still active on HN? I can't remember seeing any comments by him in the past year or so...
> Don't feel bad, you just fell into one of the common traps for first-timers in strong AI/ML. I know some lawyers in Silicon Valley with experience in this sort of thing, and they say that usually by now the code has rewritten itself so many times that the original creator can't even claim partial ownership;...
(I "got" what the post was about but took a minute to dig up the actual scene, I didn't know what the item was in the movie)
> Slime green, Comic Sans, all caps. Oh my god, it even has clip-art.
(and full props to @cperciva for being a good sport!)
You're not reading enough posts these days. I think this I've seen your exchange with Colin referenced at least once a month for the last year.
I thought "Just the once, though, huh?" was a fantastic duck-and-cover when getting nuked from orbit. I laughed.
> News.YC does flame wars a whole lot better than the rest of the internet...
> you need to re-evaluate whether you are actually building a company 'culture', or just some random agglomeration of the personality traits of the company's earliest employees.
I can't find it right now, but it lead me to purchase the book "Permutation City" which is now one of my favourite novels because of the way it comings CS, philosophy, and writing that isn't stilted like a lot of the stuff you find in this realm.
The reason I can't find the comment is that there are pages and pages of them that mention Permutation City on Google. See for yourself, Google:
permutation city site:ycombinator.com
If you haven't already, then don't wait to buy the rest of Greg Egan's œuvre. It was "Quarantine", a lovely plot but arguably one of his weakest stories, that got me into his work, and since then I've found no-one except possibly Ted Chiang (whose work is very different) who comes anywhere near him in the world of hard sci-fi. Almost everything of his is rewarding, and I believe a lot of it was relatively recently (within the last 5 years or so) released as e-books after a long period of unavailability. He also has generous excerpts from selected books and stories at his web-site, and—my favourite—proves his non-fiction science bona fides as a regular contributor on the n-category Café (https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/cgi-bin/MT-3.0/mt-search.cgi?Inc...).
Oh, actually I did read The Business, which introduced me to the delightful question "how do you count to 1000 on your fingers?" (without using 'intermediate storage' like keeping track of 10's in your head). I still use that when teaching elementary number theory.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12152658
It was this HN comment that prompted me to read it, fascinating book. The topic of the post, Boltzmann brain, is also well worth reading into.
The story (https://qntm.org/responsibility) was really fun, and there were good comments too. It's certainly one of my favorite HN posts.
Re: OQ, I don't have a single favorite, but I like whenever the hivemind hashes out what's going on with a big tech issue, like Facebook's post denying complicity in NSA spying.
I've never read anything like Greg Egan. While reading 'Diaspora' I could feel my skull expanding - he pushes you to think at a magnitude we're not used to. The last few chapters of Diaspora are something I often read myself to bed.
The top comment when I first saw it was, "If you are responsible for the security of any system, this is your immediate, drop-everything priority." [2]
Shellshock just kept going, and going, and for days you didn't know what was coming next. I suppose it's unfair to real PTSD victims to say this, but sometimes I feel like I have a little PTSD from that incident. I can only imagine what people at the center of it were going through.
My favorite blow-by-blow account was David Wheeler's essay [3] [4].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8361574 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8361871 [3] http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/shellshock.html [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8428644
Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11939851
> The feeling of having a genuinely clean butt gives you the confidence you need to go crush it in the boardroom.
I still laugh about this sometimes.
>Wipe once with toilet paper and you're good to go. It's like the best of Eastern and Western civilization, coming together to clean your ass.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012082
It explains the death of so many communities, and also sorta works for 4chan, despite the perpetual state of undeath that 4chan is in.
--https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8006869
The admin of an automated twitter feed alerting followers of rockets launched between Gaza and Israel appeals to HN for help getting in contact with someone at twitter who can relax rate limits on the account to prevent it from being suspended during a sharp escalation of conflict.
2. Einstein and the Great Fed Robbery
--https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6417511
Research from nanex using the speed of light to prove that results from a Federal Reserve meeting were leaked early. Ultimately led to policy changes at the Fed.
* The Socratic Method: Teaching by Asking Instead of by Telling - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3578807
My favorite HN post is now this one because it lets me amalgamate all the best posts that I missed.
http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/hacker-news/hacker-news-bookmark...
Keep in mind that the timestamps are when the bookmark was created, not the timestamp of the page itself.
(Happy user, otherwise unaffiliated.)
[0]:by our (more or less : ) own idlewords
As for more recent stuff, I enjoyed the thread on QuakeWorld (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11934608) (full disclosure, I posted the article, and participated heavily in the thread). And just today, I saw QuineDB (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12492812).
Sorry I couldn't give you something better.
discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8565459
article: https://medium.com/message/networks-without-networks-7644933...
>. . . And yet: the money guys are offering money. Just swallow your pride, play "Stairway to Heaven"[1] at the wedding, and pretend you've never had crazy eyes when talking about homoiconicity, and the rent will be paid.
> [1]Nothing against the song.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1206649
Patrick talks about techniques he learned to streamline his business when selling Bingo Card Creator.
Simply beautiful!
:D
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=121413
> fiaz 3127 days ago | parent | favorite | on: Ask News.YC: How to re-motivate yourself?
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.
Dear Lumber yard 1 point by daniel-cussen 3348 days ago | hide | past | web | 1 comment | favorite | yes | maybe | no
Dear Sirs,
I write to solicit; we sell termites. We provide termite adoption services for lumberyards.
While termite adoption may sound terrible at first blush, we believe it to be adviseable. The termites can dispose of wracked beams without requiring burning. The termites can also eliminate small pieces of discarded wood, and partly take care of cleaning the sawing site in your stead. They can also easily consume stockpiles that are no longer useful. This may be especially valuable in sight of the housing downturn in your area and subsequent inventory surpluses you may be dealing with. Any surplus inventory you give to the termites will largely be metabolized by the termites, and therefore decrease in volume. From a practical point of view, a termite nest can perform in your lumber yard the task it performs in nature; that of a recycler. At this point you can exploint the large amount of fertilizer left over and sell it.
You are in a position at which you can begin to sell natural fertilizer easily. Consumers relate your core business to fixing homes. You provide beams for home improvement purposes, and while that segment of the housing market is falling, the gardening market is holding up because desperate sellers will try to improve the curb appeal of their house in order to finally sell their house. This means home sellers are improving their gardens, which involves the use of fertilizer. As the housing downturn has affected your core business for the worse, why not hedge these losses by entering the fertilizer market?
Not only will termites reduce costs and expand your business, they will also provide excellent public relations. Ecology is in these days; Whole Foods can charge about twice the usual price for its products solely because they are organic. This despite any evidence the food the sell is actually better in any way. Many consumers may want to reduce their carbon footprint. By buying your fertilizer, they effectively stop about half of the carbon in a plank from reaching the atmosphere. This will provide cheap and novel marketing for both your core business and your fertilizer business.
We'll be the first to acknowledge that termites pose a serious risk to wood. They can devastate a home if left unattended for a few years. A simple "moat" around the termite's designated space will be able to effectively stop the termites from harming the good wood. In doing so, you will showcase your expertise in handling lumber and the confidence you have in your abilities. You may be able to sell termite control sprays in the process.
At Intermite, we believe adopting a nest will be an excellent way to help your core lumber business. For an up-front set-up fee of $449.00, we offer the delivery and installation and setup of a termite nest in your lumberyard.
A nest costs $450.00 plus tax. This fee includes includes delivery and installation. We offer related products such as custom fertilizer bags,
Regards, Intermite