jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Setting fair market valuation for founder's equity
Howdy,

We're incorporating a startup and need to set a fair market valuation for the company. This valuation will decide how much the founders pay for their shares.

Has anyone heard of founders being audited by the IRS and being questioned on the FMV? We think a $10,000 valuation is fair right now, but we hope to raise a series A later this year based on a multi-million dollar pre valuation. We plan to file our 83b within 30 days and be as thorough as we can with our paperwork.

Any other advice on setting the FMV with regards to personal tax liabilities?

Thanks!
Netflix Hiring Practices and Benefits
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_39/b4051059.htm?campaign_id=rss_daily
Netflix offers unlimited vacations, you structure your own compensation packages and more. And they pay (apparently) much higher than industry standards in the Valley.
Basho Luwak (large file support for Riak)
http://github.com/basho/luwak
Luwak is a service layer on Riak that provides a simple, file-oriented abstraction for enormous objects.
Web Startup Calculator
http://www.webstartupcalculator.com
All

I have made a simple web startup calculator at http://www.webstartupcalculator.com/

Its supposed to do four things

1) Describe the web startup in a one line pitch
2) tell you how much time you are saving a potential client
3) tell you how much money you are saving a potential client
4) Help you understand how many sales you need to make a month to achieve a certain amount of profit

It doesnt take into account customer acquisition costs or tell you how many sales people you need, but it will give you an idea of what the financial model could look like, it is a basic model

Best to click on the youtube full screen button to watch

Any feedback appreciated (my voice isnt the most sexy for youtube demo ;-)

Its useful for producing real figures around an idea.
Tell HN: Make sure you can be contacted as described on your user page
I tried this evening to contact a user by the information on his/her user page, and it didn't work. I just wanted to write this as a reminder to all to check your contact information and make sure that others can easily contact you by that information.
Ask HN: How do you get started by yourself?
Hi Hacker News, first post, and I'm sure the answers to this are somewhere...but waking up and reading this site every morning and all the awesome stuff that happens here gets me pumped up (who knows why); then reality hits, walk to class, do schoolwork, be bored, rinse and repeat.

So far, I've just interned a couple summers, did Rails and web dev stuff on the side, and made a bunch of little apps...nothing monumental really.

What are some of things that you guys did to take that first step? I always get the impression from the people here that their product/site was their first app/idea, but really what happened at first and what are some stepping stones to take along the way?
Ewww, You Use PHP?
http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/
http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/ewww-you-use-php/
Ask HN: Done with startups. Contemplating freelancing
(I'm a semi-regular HN participant using a burner login to hide my identity.)

I've spent all (15+ years) of my career at startups. Several times I've been a single-digit employee and have unsuccessfully founded a company. I've had one modest pay day but that money is long gone.

I think I've had enough. I've grown tired of the ups/downs and long hours (50 to 60 hours a week.) My imagination is no longer captured by prospects of changing the world or a big pay day.

I'm exploring the world of freelancing. I'm thinking I could work 4 days a week on average on paying projects (Ruby, Rails, iOS, C) and spend one day a week working on open source or other side projects (which may or may not generate revenue.) In general, looking for an environment where I have more autonomy and better work/life balance.

Has anyone successfully made this kind of transition? Many thanks.
Ask HN: chat going up or down?
I'm building a system for people to post comments and messages, in a hybrid realtime/asynchronous stream. And I wanted to ask all the hackers here: should the newest comments arrive on top or on the bottom?

It seems to me that, despite the fact that we read books from top to bottom, and most chatrooms have newer messages on the bottom, that the other way is better. Here are the pros and cons:

New messages on top:
The textbox can be on top of the webpage, encouraging people to submit a message more than if it's somewhere on the bottom, because of its more prominent (and fixed!) position.

Using pagination with this style would bring the most recent comments naturally on page 1.

Blogs often sort comments this way.

Email threads are usually shown this way, for example in gmail or on the iPhone mail

It seems this style is more suited to slower, asynchronous conversations

Comments on the bottom:

Mobile phones typically have the textbox right next to the keyboard, such as on the iPhone

People tend to read from top to bottom and they can just keep reading the messages chronologically

Pagination would be a little weird though, with this style

When uou produce a list of items that is autoplayed, such as a music mix, you want to put later items on the bottom, as there is a very strong precedent for autoplaying or numbered lists to have the numbers increase in the downward direction.

Personally for user engagement reasons I would want to favor the newer messages (and textbox) on top approach, which is what email threads, facebook posts and twitter streams do. Since I need the same interface for chat, how alen do you think it would be for people?

Do any of you know of any links to articles or usabiloty studies that have been done with this? Any insight would be definitely appreciated.
Why Apple doesn't sell to the enterprise market
http://arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits.ars/2007/08/09/stuck-on-the-enterprise
via Raganwald's submission on Programming Reddit
Version Controlling Wordpress
http://roybarber.com/version-controlling-wordpress
A lot of friends of the web asked how i usually work with Git + WordPress, so i wrote this to show the structure and steps I take to setup WordPress locally, version control and then deploy to a live server with Git. Avoiding the need for ‘Cowboy Coding’ and a fully backed up version of your website.
Open Source Shooter Nexuiz 2.5 Released
http://www.alientrap.org/nexuiz/
Nexuiz is a free open-source first person shooter that runs on Windows, Linux and OSX.
Show HN: Hacker News without leaving your terminal
https://github.com/jeyb/hackernews
I put this together since I find myself switching away from the terminal to see if anything new popped up in HN. There might be similar ones out there, didn't bother looking. It was a quick experiment, which might end up with a few more features.
The Programmer Hierarchy
http://mgccl.com/2006/12/28/phper-think-themselves-superior-than-java-programmers
Especially look at the most superior of all...!
Show HN: Visualizing a Codebase
https://octo.github.com/projects/repo-visualization
I explored an alternative way to view codebases to the typical folder/file list, showing a bird's-eye-view of its structure.

https://octo.github.com/projects/repo-visualization
Show HN: ICON-3D Avatar Creator from 2D Pixels
https://github.com/YuliangXiu/ICON
Realistic virtual humans will play a central role in mixed and augmented reality, forming a critical foundation for the Metaverse and supporting remote presence, collaboration, education, and entertainment.
To enable this, new tools are needed to easily create large-scale 3D virtual humans that can be readily animated. However, current methods need either posed 3D scans captured by expensive scanning equipment or 2D images with carefully controlled user poses. Both of them can't scale up easily.

ICON ("Implicit Clothed humans Obtained from Normals") takes a step towards robust 3D clothed human reconstruction from in-the-wild images. This also enables creating animatable avatars directly from video with personalized and natural pose-dependent cloth deformation.

Homepage: https://icon.is.tue.mpg.de/

Github: https://github.com/YuliangXiu/ICON

Google Colab: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1-AWeWhPvCTBX0KfMtgt...

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZufrPvooR2Q

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.09127
Ask HN: What is a good way to build a web application in 2021
Hello HN,
I last build web applications almost a decade or more back and am mostly in a PM role for now. About a decade back, we were building web applications with JQuery and Javascript. The frameworks involved a lot of manual work and the separation of business rules and data was hard to maintain. But the plus point was that every line of code that went into the system was known to me.

However, exploring the current web application development landscape seems a lot more scary now. Nodejs with 100's of dependencies for each basic task and tools like yarn, gulp, bower confuse me more today.

My business requirements are mostly to build a transactional crud system with a moderately complex workflow rules (i.e data passes to various stakeholders who approve/reject/modify data).

I am exploring a the right development methodology for this task. My skillset is just HTML, CSS, Javascript and Python.
Show HN: Cito – Actionable data observability for data teams
https://www.citodata.com
Hi HN! We’re Clemens and Felix from Cito - thrilled to show you what we’ve built to help data engineers stay on top of data quality issues. Think Datadog meets Incident.io.

Tests in dbt are great when checking whether specific expectations are true, but don’t work well for use cases where data patterns may change over time. When relying on testing alone, data teams regularly face situations where business stakeholders identify data issues in dashboards first, eroding trust. In such situations, understanding the implications of an issue and debugging can be a very manual and time-consuming process.

To help data engineers ensure trust in data, Cito makes it easy to go beyond simple tests. By executing scheduled or near real-time out-of-the-box anomaly detection tests (row count, schema change, etc.) or custom SQL tests, data anomalies are detected and communicated in the context of the relevant column-level lineage via Slack.

We believe data observability solutions should not stop at alerting teams to anomalies and our ambition is to support the complete end-to-end workflow of data engineers. Leveraging column-level lineage, our solution makes it straightforward to understand the context of anomalies. In addition, by automatically providing transparency in a git-blame-like fashion around ownership of data models and showing who made changes most recently, Cito helps to accelerate internal communications when troubleshooting.

We’re super keen to hear your thoughts, ideas and experiences! You can also use our docs to try Cito in less than 15 min.
New wheel for your bicycle: The Copenhagen wheel
http://senseable.mit.edu/copenhagenwheel/index.html
Elegant design, controlled via phone, on which your performance data and environmental conditions (pollution) are stored, and more...
Clever tactic for generating buzz.
http://forrst.com
This site is using an interesting invite strategy. It opens its signup window once a day at a random time and for only 15 minutes.
Show HN: Airsessment – Practice job interviews, public speaking and more
https://www.airsessment.com/
PROBLEM: Not enough time / method to practice job interviews, public speaking engagement before the big events. We get anxiety and panic attack when the time comes. There is no way to know how people perceive our conversation style.

SOLUTION: App Airsessment. Connect you with people to practice run pitches / job interviews / public speaking on demand by video calls, receive constructive feedback/ metric rating too.

Let's fill out a Quick / Fun 20 seconds form with a special discount attached as well. https://goo.gl/forms/gamJpB2QaNbikzxv2.
WebSocket whiteboard with chat
http://184.106.155.145/ws.html
Just something I built to play around with the tech. Its using EventMachine for the server. Because its only using WebSockets and a more abstract layer like Socket.IO it will only work in Chrome / Safari. (or if you have WebSockets enabled in FireFox but I didn't test it)

The board will auto-clear every 5 minutes.

Have fun!
ParrotBot reads your GMail to you
http://www.parrotbot.com
I drive to work and wanted to check and sort through my email without looking at my screen (which is not only illegal in California but dangerous as all hell). I wrote a little phone-based service that lets you dial a number and have a robot read you your email. You can take some pretty basic actions like Ignore, Archive, or Star so that your email looks cleaner by the time you get to your desk. It's definitely still rough on the edges, but curious what the HN community thinks of it. Would you guys & gals use it?
On Netscape and CSS history: "here's the history that must not come to light"
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html/msg/358f05eb3e9a79b5
Note: Substitute the http://www.eit.com/ at the beginning of the URLs with http://1997.webhistory.org/ to see the actual messages.
Link: A fast and simple PHP Router
https://github.com/apsdehal/Link
Link supports RESTful routes and helps you create clean Web apps and APIs through its various features like Named Routes.
Its an effort to combine good parts of various php router, like toro's method of parsing routes, laravel's named routes, others middleware etc. so much.
Starting to really grok Lisp with Brian Harvey's lectures at Berkeley.
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details_new.php?seriesid=2008-D-26263&semesterid=2008-D
I'm on the fourth lecture, higher order expressions, part 2 (lambda, ycombinator, etc) Thus far, I like it, I really like it. Anything else of this quality for sophomore or (looking ahead) or junior level CompSci? Also, anyone know if Anarki is stable on PLT Scheme 4.1.1? I installed 3.5.2 for arc, but I think I'm better of learning scheme as a beginner.
Ask HN: Where's the fun in programming?
I work as a freelance web designer and developer.

When I first started out I only offered web design services, but soon found out that it is almost impossible to get clients who need design only. Most clients just want a complete functional website not just a design.

So I learned HTML, CSS and eventually Javascript, and PHP.

The problem is that I dislike coding. I find it to be very boring.

I read on HN and on other forums and blogs about how passionate programmers are about coding and how they love nothing more than to code away into the wee hours of the night, but I never understood why.

I get the part where its a thrill to solve problems. I love solving problems too, but conceptually not through coding. For example, I like the concept of ranking a page higher based on how other sites link to it (ie Google's Pagerank), and would enjoy conceptualizing further improvements, but I would find it extremely boring to translate that solution into code.

For a web application, the code might make the entire thing operate, but it never affects the user the way the design or interface does.

Can anyone passionate about coding tell me where the fun is in coding?
Test Driven Development Actually Works
http://blog.jphpsf.com/2012/09/30/OMG-test-driven-development-actually-works/
You often hear people advocate that writing tests (unit, functional, etc.) when building software leads to less bugs in production. In this post, I am trying to demonstrate this statement by analyzing real numbers from my current job. No tests were written originally and once tests were included, I became a strong advocate of the TDD methodology.
Websites are clients, too
http://engineering.foursquare.com/2011/12/08/web-sites-are-clients-too/
The site redesign and recently launched website features like the homepage map, lists, and notifications, have brought them closer together. With these features we’ve begun consuming our own public APIs, via JavaScript, directly from the website.
Happy birthday Dancer - two years of the Perl Dancer web framework project
http://www.preshweb.co.uk/2011/08/happy-birthday-dancer/
Today marks two years since the first CPAN release of Dancer, a Perl web framework. A quick summary of how far we've come since then.
Frontend: The web visual editor
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/emoriz/frontend-the-web-visual-editor
Kickstart campaign for the most advanced open-source web editor for your browser.
Show HN: Watermelon – open-source VSC ext. to document code and view Git blame
https://github.com/watermelontools/wm-extension
Hey there HN! We're a pair of devs looking to get feedback for our open-source project.

We're remote engineers who have contracted for many clients overseas. There's a problem that all codebases share: Onboarding devs to a new codebase is hard no matter what.

We're also open-source engineers and learned about the techniques used in OSS to tackle the problem. Please give us your feedback.

Homepage: https://watermelon.tools/

Repo: https://github.com/watermelontools/wm-extension

Install: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Watermel...
Google Gravity experiment
http://www.mrdoob.com/projects/chromeexperiments/google-gravity/
Google Gravity Experiment , check it out.
Samsung Galaxy S 2 (International) Review
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4686/samsung-galaxy-s-2-international-review-the-best-redefined
Staggering review, Anandtech analyses every aspect of this phone, and the smartphone industry comprehensively and scientifically.

Samsung have really impressed with this phone, in terms of how much effort they have invested in the hardware and software. One thing still stands out for me, the battery life. While good, it still doesn't hold a candle to the iPhone 4, as shown on the charts.
Show HN: In memory of Bob Ross, a simple painting generator, Gogh
http://ngokevin.github.com/gogh/
Currently features the sky, the ground, and a tree.

Happy little clouds are in progress.
How to Track Six Key Metrics for Your Web App
http://thinkvitamin.com/web-apps/how-to-track-six-key-metrics-for-your-web-app/
Identified and defined the six key metrics you need to measure for your recurring revenue web app. Also shared an example Google Spreadsheet which can be downloaded and modified for your app.
Ubuntu Reaches 220,000 PCs in Schools in Spain
http://www.thevarguy.com/2012/09/10/ubuntu-reaches-220000-pcs-in-schools-in-spain/
Canonical’s recent efforts to promote desktop Ubuntu on the workstations of large organizations have focused primarily on the business world. But perhaps the company’s greatest prospects lie in the education channel. That’s where 220,000 Ubuntu-based PCs are now running in Andalusia, Spain. Here are the details, and what they say about desktop Linux’s viability in the education market. ...
Apple AirTunes private key extracted
http://www.mafipulation.org/blagoblig/2011/04/08#shairport
Now that the AirTunes private key is known, it could allow for 3rd party software to act like AirTunes devices.
If this for example would be implemented in XBMC, Plex, Boxee etc you could send audio from your IOS device straight to XBMC using IOS built-in Airplay support.
We need an AirBNB for Mentorship--not $35k a year wasted on college
http://launch.is/blog/l024-spend-your-college-tuition-on-being-mentored-and-starti.html
anyone out there want to build mentormykid.com? dead serious... I will fund it. :-)

i meet young adults all day long who are $100-200k in debt after school. makes no sense.
Say No to Ireland's SOPA
http://stopsopaireland.com/
SOPA is the name of a piece of US legislation, the Stop Online Piracy Act.

A similar proposal is about to become law in Ireland. And while 7 million Americans contacted their representatives to say No to SOPA in the US, Irish citizens will not get that chance because the new law in Ireland is not being voted on in the Oireachtas.

Instead, <b>the law is being enacted by ministerial order</b>. This new law will give music and movie companies the legal leverage to force Irish ISPs like UPC, Eircom and mobile networks to block access to sites suspected of having copyrighted material on them. It also means judges can order ISPs to block access to sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter where an individual user from anywhere in the world has shared infringing material.
My Python Code for the Netflix Prize
https://github.com/alexbw/Netflix-Prize
I competed alone in the Netflix Prize in college under the team name "Hi!". I've never seen anybody release their code, and I'm getting back into machine learning now, and realized that some folks might want to take a gander at a competitive machine learning codeset.

It's implemented mostly in Python, with Cython for the real speed-sensitive parts (everything in file "svd.pyx" did the heavy lifting, and got me up the leaderboard).

I hope that some folks will find this useful.
Try R — A new online course, for free
http://oreilly.com/go/tryr/
Sponsored by O'Reilly, build by CodeSchool (creators of Rails for Zombies), this is a free online course.
Show HN: Postcard – Easy way to make a personal website
https://postcard.page/
Today I'm launching Postcard!

I started Postcard when I deleted most social media, but still wanted a way to keep in touch with friends and my network.

When I worked at Webflow, it became clear to me that most website builders are way too complex for individual users. So, I drew inspiration from social media - where all you need is a couple photos and text fields to get a great site online. So, I think I’ve about achieved a site builder that even my Mom could use.

The product seems simple, but there are many under-the-hood optimizations. There's caching, CDNs, custom domain support, TLS certificate issuance + management, dynamically-generated open graph images, image optimizations, email sending, full-text RSS feed, email reputations, and more. It also uses a couple new products to make the domain connection process easy.

Let me know if you have any feedback or questions!

PS - Rumor is that Twitter is shutting down Revue. If you want help transferring content and subscribers over to Postcard, just email me!
Show HN: HomeSheet – easy-to-use home inventory software
https://homesheet.co
Hi HN!

I've spent the last few months building HomeSheet - The all in one tool to track your personal assets. I built HomeSheet to make organizing and documenting my belongings a breeze. I've always wanted to put together a home inventory to protect myself in the event of a disaster, but I never found a solution that I liked.

Right now HomeSheet is in early access, and I'm still working on determining what additional features users would like. I'll be around in the comments if you have any feedback, questions, or just want to say hi!
Show HN: Lurnby, a tool for better learning, is now open source
https://github.com/Roznoshchik/Lurnby
I've been working on Lurnby for 2 years. It's kind of like a mix of pocket + kindle + anki.

It lets you
=> add add epubs, pdfs, and web articles to the app
=> highlight and add comments
=> tag and organize highlights
=> review them with a spaced repetition system

Today I made the decision to open source the project. I'm passionate about helping other people learn to learn better and hope that this will allow a lot more innovation in the tool and the space.

I'm very new to open source and development in general really, but looking forward to receiving the guidance of the community.