skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I suggest not bringing her on as an employee or founder, but instead as just a consultant. She can come by and advise you with your code if you need it. You might even let her have a small piece of equity (non-controlling and certainly not more than any other founders).

Think of what will happen to your relationship if you have a fundamental disagreement with which direction your startup should go (and there will be a lot of course corrections along the way).

Worst case with a just-business co-founder: Your startup fails and you go your separate ways, sure that it's the other founder's fault that you didn't get the funding round.

Worst case with your girlfriend co-founder (or even simply employee): you disagree with her and piss her off somehow. She still works there so she goes behind your back and undoes what work you do, by sabotaging your efforts, and maybe even bringing other people in to your disagreement, and ultimately your relationship (not cheating, but forming factions against you within your startup). Now your startup ultimately fails as in case one, except in this case you've also lost your girlfriend.

Alternate worst case with your girlfriend co-founder: You have a fundamental disagreement with her, but because of the emotions involved in a relationship, she leaves the team entirely (and with no notice) taking her work with her (by acting maliciously or just simply leaving without letting other people know what she's done already, leaving them clueless as how to run what she was responsible for).

Either way, the downside is larger when your girlfriend is involved. Too many emotions involved in relationships to add to the stress of a startup. Don't do it.
Curious, when does a comment become deleted like this? Is it automatically deleted after a certain number of down-mods, do the HN admin gods remove it for whatever reason, or is it only removed when the poster manually deletes it after a comment has been made on it?

Replied to you since I can't reply to the deleted comment.
Web 2.0 Experts Share Startup Lessons
In the long run, it's cheaper just to outsource that kind of work.
I've been using Dvorak for about seven years. I'd recommend using ABCD to learn:

http://www.gigliwood.com/abcd/
Also, it's against the terms of service for basically all ISPs to let you run a server. They'll probably only enforce it, though, when you start getting a lot of traffic -- this means that you'll be turned off right as you are starting to gain traction. That's a bad time to have 404s. Also, what happens if the power flickers? Internet goes down?

Start with a VPS -- even if 30 bucks a month sounds like a big chunk of change, consider your other overhead (rent, groceries, etc). Not a big price to pay for the benefits.

Good luck!
1 guy in a straightjacket can do more in .5h than IBM engineers can do in 50.
I'm a 29yo Irishman with a Google Account. Who put me on Orkut? As a 19yo lady from American Samoa?
My most recent login, it said, was 29 December 2007. I have no recollection of ever creating or logging in to an Orkut account. I <i>presume</i> that no-one has got hold of my Google Account password and used it to maliciously register me to Orkut. And no, I wasn't drunk over Christmastime.
Manually deleted by the poster within one hour after original post. If the admins got rid of it, it would still be there but it would be marked "dead" and would only show up if you enabled showdead in your profile.
I thought it was a funny troll. Would be curious to see other examples of this technique on niche forums.
The funny thing is that I always thought (just like you) that C-v was an arbitrarily assigned key before you mentionned it. I guess we could call this "contradiction intuition" or something.
"Did anything disasterous happen, like a /.ing?"

I once got on the front page of digg with a home server, but it was before that meant a lot of traffic so I think the server actually survived.

I wouldn't recommend it though. Mine was just a hobby site, and running the server was part of the fun. For anything more than that you are better off with professional hosting.
You probably need more experience. Nobody writes bug free code. Furthermore it's often not a good idea to write "perfect" code the first time around. When your code base grows, you might need to change things around and refactor some stuff.
There are already lots of startups that do livevideo, and here youtube is poised to take on all of them.
From the article: Avoid wearing bright clothes like yellow and orange, this will definitely attract sharks.

Wear a suit to attract venture capitalists.
You mean like wikis? Or online books/documentation. Yeah, it's a shame those aren't an option for publishing.
User mixmax already mentioned this ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=126306 ).
slicehost.com is the best I've seen for a VPS so far, $20 beginner. They also say they're negotiable on bandwidth starting at $0.30/GB, which is a bonus if you're running a popular blog and for some reason need more than 100GB bandwidth.

As for power, you've always got UPS'.

Internet is the tricky one as all private hosts use redundancies, although I don't see why you couldn't sign up for regular internet and a cable connection.

I've seen a handful of ISPs that let you run a server (or more correctly, don't stop you), although I think most ISPs prohibit it to force you onto business packages (which you can get in your home too).

I know in the Toronto region there is Mountain Cable, which doesn't have anything in their Terms of Service preventing you, and have unlimited bandwidth (From speed tests I've seen, they're faster than Cogeco, and get an upload speeds in the 1+MB/s range). I think you've just got to settle with DynDNS, however from what I've read this is reccomended for static IP's too. If you did have two ISPs then this would solve the IP problem when you switch.

I'm actually considering going with Mountain Cable anyway as they're cheaper than Cogeco. Although their lack of information on their website freaks me out; I mean their service area map isn't even online. (Edit: They do have a service area map for their internet, however they apparently provide service outside of the area)
I've run my personal site (http://www.guydavis.ca) for years over a server at home via a cable modem. However, my ISP will completely clamp down on bandwidth for any real traffic.

For my own "just for fun" project (http://www.babynamemap.com), I wanted to be able to handle more than one visitor at time. :) I'm hosting the RoR app on the cheapest Slicehost VPS for $20/month.

So, if you don't care about many concurrent visitors and decent uptime, then save $20 and host from your home. However, if you actually want the general public to come visit, then get yourself some cheap hosting.
This is really quite disgusting.
Times certainly change. In 2000, having any experience in open source software was a certain method to get ignored by recruiters.
lucky you
I know a few people from Phoenix who will be presenting at SXSW. I searched on some names, and got no hits.

Is this handling just a sub-set of all of SXSW? Are names not searchable?

Oh, and is there source code one can glom? :)

It looks really sweet.
Airport security concerns: Bluetooth, switchblades and — wireless X-rays?
If you take into account the bathtub curve ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve ) then using a trusty old computer is a very good way to start.
The company doing this, Miracle, got so much press from this stunt that they pulled another one: If you contact them with an offer from a company on their black-list they will do the exact same job for half the price.

What companies are on their blacklist?

Only one:

IBM.
aoeuidhtns!
I've used Dvorak for at least six years now. Love it.

For anyone interested in learning, I found that the best sites were:
http://www.gigliwood.com/abcd/
http://dvorak.nl/learn.plp
and the program KP Typing Tutor (great dvorak exercises).
interesting comparison tool: http://www.siteuri.ro/dvorak/

How about the awesomeness of the dvorak home row?
3269 Scrabble words (OSPD) can be typed on the home row, including nine 15-letter words (such as tendentiousness)
206 for asdfkhjkl. Longest: halakhahs and haggadahs

_____
Estimated finger travel distance (horizontal) for all of the above text
QWERTY: 15.3m
Dvorak: 10.5m
How Google and eBay Act Like Nations
The Coming Death Of Indian Outsourcing
I just disabled the alert that said "Please enter a username and password above first" when you clicked on an event without logging in. Now it just shows the event details.

The signup process is extremely simple. Type in a username, enter a password and it creates an account. I'm the first one to complain about needless signups but to make your own schedule and have it printable in a decent format, signing up is pretty much the best solution.

I just setup iCal export for your selected sched.org events. My username is 'chirag' so my schedule will be http://sched.org/sxsw2008/chirag and iCal URL will be http://sched.org/sxsw2008/chirag.ical

If you use Google Calendar, you can import this directly.

This is a very specific tool with a narrow market/target-audience and not meant to replace anything general like Google Calendar or Eventful.
I just added panelist info to the db. The search currently only searches the event name and venues. I'll see if I can make it search panelists and the detailed description without putting too much pressure on the tiny server.
BRL is some kick ass code. Thanks.
Talking about Tipjoy is what made my cofounder (also my wife) and I decide to go for it. She was at iRobot. I was at Nokia. Both of us had excellent jobs.

The clincher that made us quit was when it became perfectly clear that those jobs, or their equivalent, are readily available should we fail. If the worst, worst case scenario is the status quo, why not go for it?
pretty good talk about talks. maybe an update with projectors and graphics would be good. Does Al Gore's Inconvenient truth talk or some of Steve Job's talks not contravene many of these items?
For us, yes. We spend about as much per month on Salesforce as a developer's salary. Might as well devote 2 or 3 months of developer time and come up with something that actually fits our needs.

(sorry for the late response)
Dvorak: been using it for a few years. i switched to it cold turkey. one thing that can screw you up is touching qwerty after switching, something you don't really need to do. dvorak is implemented as a language and comes standard in most OS's, so the excuse that "it will be difficult when using someone else's computer" is a poor one. some people can probably learn to use both layouts without too much trouble... i'm not one of those people, and i would advise against trying to use both, as learning dvorak will be much more difficult

qwerty is simply atrocious. the semicolon key says it all. who the fuck puts a semicolon key on the home row? i've heard various explanations for the retarded layout but i think it's just retardation. even the story of how it was to balance the hammers for typewriters to minimize collision seems retarded since the manufacturers could have switched around the letters on the hammers themselves

something that people miss is that dvorak is about comfort, not speed. sure, someone who is good at typing will probably be substantially faster on dvorak then on qwerty, but for me at least it's all about comfort. though i do type quite a bit faster than i did on qwerty

re: Vi, it wasn't hard switching at all. one thing i learned to do was use 'ce' (replace to end of word) rather than 'cw' (replace word) since c and w are on the same finger in dvorak

specifically i use programmer dvorak http://www.kaufmann.no/roland/dvorak/ which leaves the basic dvorak alphabet unchanged but switches around the symbols. instead of `1234567890-= the top row is $&[{}(=* )+]!#. the numbers are shifted

i took things a step further and started using a program called AutoHotkey: http://www.autohotkey.com/ i have LAlt + C mapped to Esc, LAlt + H to Backspace, LAlt + T to Enter, Caps and Enter to Ctrl, and RAlt to Caps. these are global, not just for Vim

Ergonomic Keyboard: i use a microsoft ergonomic:
http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Natural-Ergo-Keyboard-4000/d...
i'm surprised these aren't much more popular. it's probably because of patents or something, or people don't realize how much better they are. they are as much an improvement over regular keyboards as dvorak is over qwerty. dvorak + ergonomic keyboard will get you FAR in terms of comfort

i also use a wacom tablet instead of a mouse. i've never had any wrist pain or anything with this setup. i'm anal about comfort for the same reason i use Vim rather than a silly IDE. i figure if i'm going to be typing and using a computer so much, generally hours a day for the rest of my life, then the tools i use are extremely important and it's worth it to invest in the best ones
Yes. I do all the support for Jython in ImageJ (a java scientific imaging application.) Google my name for my webpage where the Jython Interpreter for ImageJ is hosted.
Yes, I've been using Dvorak exclusively for a year or two. Vim was annoying at first, but it's really not too bad. Even if you don't remap the keys the new locations of hjkl make reasonable sense.

My question for you Dvorak users is how easily can you switch back and forth between it and qwerty? I can do it without much trouble, but I know another guy who has a very hard time switching. I'm curious what the general trend is.
Works best for me: making the caps be the escape key, and swapping alt and control.

I am a vim user.

Why swap alt and control: so that I can do control+whatever while pushing control with my thumb. No wrist or weird little finger streching to push the caps key.
I have to echo what they said.

Audiogalaxy was simply wonderful. Even now, I would still say it's better than current P2P offerings.

You could find so much.. and the client was so very lightweight!
Silicon Insider: How Ask.Com Could Overtake Google.Com
Ask YC: anyone on kluster.com?
There are some programs that can be both in common use and "dead." yes(1), echo(1) and the like come to mind.
As other posters have said, it's probably a bad idea to run your site from home if there's any chance of seeing a traffic spike. Most ISPs will cut you off at the worst possible moment.

The biggest counter example I know of for a site that started this way and ended up huge is Markus Frind's free dating site, Plenty of Fish.

"I was running the entire site off my home PC and ADSL connection for the first 8 months."
(not sure if this is the original site that hosted this interview, but it's the first one Google turned up:
http://www.traffick.com/articles/innovators/01-markus-frind.... )
Nah, just based on very poor understanding.
Well, I don't know about you, but I'm awaiting the day when people design their own clothes, write their own legal documents, and perform their own surgeries. After all, billions of dollars are lost every year to medical mishaps, so we should make tools so everyone can administer their own medicine!
You can now search for specific panelists.
For something like "expected salary", you want to be optimistic. ;-)
+1 for the web design
Supposedly you're not supposed to switch to dvorak too quickly, like within a 48 hour period like I did. It kind of scrambles your brain a bit, and I lost my ability to qwerty for a moment there. With time I started typing quicker in both dvorak, and qwerty again.

Can you talk a bit more about using the tablet as a mouse? I have a multi-monitor set up now and just noticed theres a spot on my desk for a tablet. I suppose it would have to be put into relative mode, not absolute.
I don't believe this matters much free broadcasting over the web of video is a commodity (or will be) but what is not a commodity is the technology that justin.tv has built itself.

One good idea would be to partner with a a company that builds Satellite trucks and start making the infrastructure to use video over IP instead of video direct to Satellite. The goal being to become the protocal of broadcasting video over ip for television newsrooms.
I've read a lot of ELisp code, and I have very rarely seen the equivalent of Ruby-style monkey patching. Even the advice mechanism, an AOP-like feature which enables functions to be dynamically wrapped and chained, somewhat like Rails' alias_method_chain, is used sparingly. Instead, every mature Emacs extension exposes a plethora of "hooks", extension points that other packages can attach their own handlers to. Other packages add their handlers to these hooks, and to hooks that the core Emacs code provides, and thus they cooperate largely without collisions. -- http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/02/never-complain-only...
As for usage, what I meant was at Berkeley a student made a homebrew app to help organize class schedules.

This is the database:
http://schedule.berkeley.edu/

This is the app:
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~amanb/makeSched/

Your app is the perfect interface if it can hook into the Berkeley schedule database.
Indeed. I chortled when I saw that line, and mumbled to myself "I used LAMP in 2000..."

I've only slowly realized how trivial it is to stay several years ahead of the "enterprise". Stuff people at Hacker News consider old hat by now (Rails, say, or Django) will be big news in the enterprise a couple years from now. Then a few years after that will come excitement about Erlang, and Scala, and Seaside...
The Point of Tipping - Get Rid of the Tip Jars
> "we never had to deal with sharding the index across multiple servers or a hash table of words that wouldn’t fit in memory. Speaking of which, I’d love to read some papers on how internet-scale search engines actually do that. Does anyone have any recommendations?"

I can speak from experience on a very large search engine (not on a google scale in # of docs, but within an order of magnitude - and google scale in terms of qps [estimated - google doesn't publish such numbers])

Re: "sharding the index across multiple servers" - every document has an id, mod the id against some number (preferably much larger than the number of partitions/shards you have), split you index servers into N clusters, assign mods to a cluster (do so in a way that you avoid hotspots), have a "query aggregator" that sends an incoming query to one server in every partition. the aggregator then merges the result sets and resorts based on a sort key passed by the search node.

Re: "hash table of words that wouldn’t fit in memory" - the vocabulary I had to work with included at least 7 (human) languages with _many_ artificial words. The # of hash entries tended to hover around 2.7M tokens. How, do not include numbers in the index (there's an infinite number of them :)), ignore case, and tokenization. Tokenization is relatively easy except for CJK languages for that either have fluent/native speakers define the tokenizing semantics or find/buy a library.
The bulk of my site was built on 35-minute train rides. I use Scheme. A functional language does make it easier to pick up where you left off and see where you were headed with incomplete code.
This is absurd and stupid.

But entertaining as hell to watch in fast forward.
...and the coming rise of Indian entrepreneurship.

People are often too quick to cry racism, but I really think that's the only explanation for all these "India isn't a problem" stories.

Most Indian engineers are Java drones, but guess what... most American programmers are Java drones. And yeah, there's a new generation that's prosperous on relatively less effort, but have you taken a look at Silicon Valley lately?

Unless you believe that the American innovation engine is also slowing, you don't have a lot of reasons to believe that we won't see more and more innovation coming out of India. In fact, if there's a crash in outsourcing, it might accelerate that process (or simply shift the outsourcing market to target Europe).
Very, Very Well Documented
Oh, otherwise the comment would just disappear, but it shows as deleted when there are replies to it.
Market efficiency in the sack.
And Africa will become the last bastion of cheap outsourcing and manufacturing.
That too, but I think this is the real issue:

http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Apple gears up for June launch of 3G iPhone
I'm about the same way. Rather than blame the language or circumstances though, perhaps we should both look to see what habits we can develop to improve. Even a little improvement will mean an extra hour or so per week.
so long as nobody's acting against their will, i can't take issue with it.
In a moral sense?
The sharding thing is such an interesting problem. I'm thinking about the case where a user searches for "A B". Assume A has a few million matching IDs, B also has few million, and (of course) the indexes for A & B are stored on different servers. Do you have to pull the full result sets for A & B back to a single aggregator to intersect them? I'd love to learn more about the optimizations for that problem.
Great, thank you very much.
What's SXSW? When I read "scheduler" I started trying to parse it as a locking scheme. "Shared eXclusive Shared Write? WTF does that mean?"
Shouldn't there always be a balance between what people want and what they need? (ex. hard drugs, suicide, ajax)
I learned Dvorak in high school, used it for about three months. Ultimately, I went back to qwerty because I, too, have an incredibly hard time switching between the two. I wasn't about to restrict myself to only using Dvorak-enabled computers.
Boto:  Python interface to Amazon Web Services and SimpleDB
I hosted half a dozen low traffic websites at home with a very old pentium III with 64 mb of RAM, running FreeBSD 5.3 (that was a while ago) and apache. We had a DSL with a fixed IP.
FreeBSD did a very nice job at distributing the load. The machine was always responsive.
We throw it away when moving out.
Why didn't I think of that. Damn.
I can switch back and forth quite easily. I use dvorak the vast majority of the time, but when I play games I use qwerty because remapping all the hotkeys just takes too long. (And it's hard to hit the right key when you glance down and see the wrong letter in a game.)

Since most online games require a lot of chatting, I have lots of practice actually typing real stuff in both fairly quickly.
Why Startups Fail: They Run Out Of Cash
It is. These men didn't come to her door with their solicitations, and when she sought them out, they were completely upfront about everything. She, on the other hand, deliberately wasted their time, for her own fun and profit. "Sleaze" indeed.

I don't know what's more disgusting, that or her ignorance of basic economics, where she thinks his income is somehow relevant to how much the use of her vagina is worth.
I have that exact keyboard myself. Say what you want about Microsoft, but their mice and keyboards are awesome.

I don't usually find the symbols to be a problem, but I'm tempted to try that top row switch just to avoid hitting shift so much.
I am not so sure. Maybe the wages will stop rising? Once companies start to lose business, they will fire employees, creating an oversupply of workers and thus driving wages down?
How I Overcame My Math Blocks