blacksmythe

Here is a (hardware engineering) example of how a group of volunteers are helping make the world a better place:

    http://www.unite-to-light.org/

(developed lights with solar-powered storage for students without access to electricity).

  >> Use counters, avoid modulo, 

That is also my solution (although I would use only two counters).

Having a background in hardware engineering and hardware optimization, using a modulo operation unnecessarily seems completely foreign to me.

  >> use home-made charcoal 

How do you make your charcoal?

The only method I am familiar with is the method used at Plimouth Plantation - a giant pile of wood buried under earth, tended round the clock for two days.

    http://blogs.plimoth.org/pilgrim-blog/?tag=charcoal

Universally good advice:

  >> Ask yourself frequently, “Am I having fun?”

  >> The answer needn’t always be yes. 
  >> But if it’s always no, it’s time for a new project or a new career.

It is very feasible to learn enough of a foreign language from CDs to interact with people that don't speak any English.

For romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian), the Michel Thomas CDs are the best that I have seen. For other languages, Pimsleur tapes are usually the best option.

  >> 99% gcc and 1% some startup code 

Modifying and selling gcc to compile code optimized for lots of different underpowered processors sounds like an unattractive business model to me, given (I assume) a relatively small number of customers for any given microprocessor type and (again I assume) a significant amount of work for each microprocessor type supported.

Not such a simple calculation, as paying higher salaries drives up the cost of living.

Here is Spolsky's take on what Bill Gates was like to work for:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html

Certainly feared to some extent.

  >> simply getting credentialed (i.e. getting your Ph.D.) 
  >> does not mean you can count on a tenure track 
  >> academic faculty position.

This has never been the case. In order to avoid exponential growth, the average professor that trains Ph.D.s can only produce in his/her career about one student who goes on to become a professor that trains Ph.D.s. (ignoring some growth in a particular field). Some schools produce a much larger number of future professors. As a result many smaller schools produce very few.

If you are not challenged by these problems, here is an alternative that I found considerably more difficult:

http://www.spoj.com/

Emission is frequently conducted through the components backward to the input antenna and transmitted. In this case a Faraday cage would not help.

Conducted/radiated local oscillator radiation can be substantially suppressed if this is a design criterion.

  >> claim that it eliminates bugs

You may not have read 'Land of Lisp'.

  >> There are very few examples of startups which start 
     with a product with features highly specific to one 
     group of users and then expand out successfully to 
     a huge market. 

There are very few examples of startups when successfully address a huge market with any strategy.

Succeeding in a vertical is a positive step, which most startups fail at. For one thing, it give you enough money to keep trying for a larger success.

  >> Are Ebay/alibaba retailers trustworthy?

I have had very good results buying from sellers with >99% rating. I have had fairly poor results with sellers having 98% rating or lower.

I think that most people don't give bad reviews even after a bad experience. You might expect a bad experience once out of 50 times with a seller having a 98% rating, but I have found it to happen much, much more often.

  >> Does it make more sense to just keep working your backlog or 
  >> take time to get quality people on the team so you can double 
  >> your velocity on your next sprint? 

Agree. A good hire can help you a lot, and a bad hire hurts orders of magnitude more than the time spent on an interview.

Interview time has a very high ROI.

Most companies hire by department, so a good manager is incentivized to do a good phone screen (or at least make sure a good phone screen is done), because it is their people who waste time on a plant interview of an unqualified candidate.

Google's policy of separating the interview process from the job assignment breaks a lot of the incentives to interview that most companies have in place.

The split between people who have children and their friends that don't predates Facebook.

When you have kids your life changes so completely that you no longer have nearly as much in common with your friends that didn't. It is hard to imagine how social media could prevent this.

  >> he sorts automatically to the top of the page. Which then gets him more karma, etc etc.

Patio11 gets high karma for his comments because he consistently posts insightful comments and people (myself included) search out what he had to say: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=patio11

  >> And if you want to learn from someone who can do $100/hour consulting then it 
     may cost you an arm and a leg to learn anything from him.

“The only thing more expensive than education is ignorance.”

Benjamin Franklin quotes (American Statesman, Scientist, Philosopher, Printer, Writer and Inventor. 1706-1790)

  >>  most similar projects don't seem to stick around very long ...

  >> ... http://hckrnews.com/ is an exception I can recall)

Much improved way for me to quickly skim HN.

I would be sad if it disappeared.

Because numerical processing is a major use case, Python has a number of techniques to easily speed up critical sections of code (numpy, cython, pypy).

I am not aware of comparable features in Ruby.

Rather than a list of lifetime karma, I would rather see a list of users with the most karma within the last year.

Paul Graham does not post his best writing directly on HN, but he writes really insightful blog posts

which get submitted here (in my opinion some of the most insightful comments posted on HN are from his blog).

  (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=MatthewPhillips)
 
  "My current interests are in Clojure, ClojureScript, and IndexedDB."

Yet it appears that you are keeping quite current with new technology :)

  >> is there a dead man switch or notification procedure in place?

The absence of weekly HN posts.

Markdown is fantastic as a first draft of something, when you want to focus almost solely on content.

For subsequent revisions, it makes far less difference to me what format the text is in.

(edit: for that reason any deficiencies in Markdown don't bother me)

  >> Of course stripping the labour cost out is only possible 
  >> if you can do it yourself :)

Or assign value to your time.

Although I am not going to fault the conclusion, there are a number of questionable assumptions in this analysis.

One is that the expected value of an effort is not the probability of trying times the expected value of succeeding. Multiplying by 1% since only 1% of companies raise VC funds is not relevant. The correct proportion should be the percentage of companies that try to raise VC funds which are successful. Say this is 10%.

Two is that you are not going to spend the 10 years used for comparison trying and failing to raise VC funding. After 6 months you should give up, and spend the next 9.5 years trying to build a small business (expected value = (90% chance of failing to raise VC funding) * (9.5years/10years)* $356.4k ~ $305k).

Three is that the expected value of an exit is not the probability of a minimum exit cutoff times that exit value. There is a power law distribution to success, so the expected value of an exit is much higher than $100M * 2%. I'll be lazy and guess that the expected value is 3x higher due to the power law distribution of success (I imagine 3x is grossly underestimating here).

This makes the expected value of the VC success $3.3k * 10x * 3x ($100k) + the expected value that you give up on VC funding and start a small business ($305k), or approximately $405k. Not nearly so obvious a choice as painted in this blog post.

  >> what it would cost to maintain a similar standard of living in two different cities. 

What is would cost to maintain a similar standard of living, when spending all of your money where you live. (like most families with kids :) )

Someone who saves $20k/year or spends large amounts on travel would have a much higher standard of living in SF than Minneapolis.

Now we just need clickable links, and ability for readers to submit the stories behind the headlines!