skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It quickly becomes illegal to incorporate in the Cayman Islands if you're really a US company incorporated in the Cayman Islands to not pay US taxes.

Cayman Islands also screams shady. Google and Microsoft both have Irish subsidiaries to save on taxes. I'm sure doing that legally is incredibly complicated and expensive. When you get that big, it will be worth it to hire someone to help you save on taxes. For now, a Delaware C-Corp or LLC is good enough. Nevada if you really want to save 1%.
Where to next for Zoho?
Soloing on the guitar.

That working for a company isn't the only option.
Oh I don't know, maybe abstain from having an SEO category right on the front page?
Streamlined meteorite hit Peru fast and hard last September
I don't mind what he looks like in real life. But it's just silly to actively try to look like a stereotype in a professional photo. As a counter-example, look at his website. He looks nerdy but in a totally normal way. He'd be better off with the photo from his webpage on the article because the context sets off the oddness. My 2 cents.
An Enduring Measure of Fitness: The Simple Push-Up
I've thought about this...there are a lot of countries that will charge you little or no taxes, and some countries that will let you hire anyone you want (I find freedom in hiring more important than reducing tax exposure), but I don't know how many countries have both these things. Also, tax haven countries are sometimes very expensive places. Dubai, Montecarlo, Bermuda, and so forth. All insane. Even if you're not headquartered there, you might have the expense hit you in some form or another. The expense might be more damaging than paying taxes in US.

There's probably a reason only a few industries see their companies incorporate in tax havens (mostly insurers and financiers). The government might insist on having you fill out many phone-books worth of forms, pay special taxes, abide by certain restrictions, and so on. It might be outright illegal. A lot of companies got established in Delaware because this presents advantages; if they're not incorporating in a tax haven, I doubt it's because they're lazy.

On the other hand, one strategy I haven't heard being used, but have found nothing wrong with (so far) is going IPO with Nasdaq Portal. It costs like $8000 and makes stock available to investors with 100M or more in liquid assets, termed Qualified Institutional Investors. I haven't heard of anyone doing it, and I might be glossing over a huge downside to going public like this. In any case, you get to sell stock, and you avoid the Sarbanes-Oxley compliance fee of ~3 million dollars a year.
thanks ... i used cayman island just as an example but there are many others - i think it won't be that profitable else all YC companies would have been taking advantage of this. Do you know where all YC companies are incorporated????
Dungeon Master: The Life and Legacy of Gary Gygax
I should be clear; I haven't read Zed's documentation and neither approve nor disapprove what he wrote. My reactions are strictly to the notion that a protocol creator shouldn't mention specifics in a security document -- that's flat out wrong.

Until the snarky bit at the end there, I agreed with you 100%.
At Justin.tv, we give really good programmers equity and we pay them good salaries. So if you know any who are risk averse but want to work at a startup, send them our way.
And therein lies what the DropBox guys figured they could do. I didn't they could either until I saw them demo it. It's really quite slick, and is a completely different product than the usual "online storage" product. It's not yet another "web-based file manager"...it's a file system that works seamlessly over the Internet. With revisions.
your right - there r many scared of Sarbanes-Oxley - its too complicated and complex - its just a lobby to make money.
This is from 2/12/2008...
So, just curious, why haven't you guys bought dropbox.com from whoever owns it now? Seems like a smart move because if I tell people to "try dropbox", they'll go to dropbox.com first.
6 Websites That Will Certainly Make You Smarter
This is why I put our company's savings into potatoes.
from the comments:

# Michael Arrington

March 11th, 2008 at 9:10 am

one VC, speaking off record, said that some of their portfolio companies would likely fail because of this. When I asked him why he wouldn’t loan the companies money, he said that perhaps they wouldn’t make the investment decision again given where the companies have gone, and that the fact that there are other VCs investing makes it hard/impossible to figure out who should pay how much.

translation: they are on their own.
Just a note on ragel: it can be used to create lexers, but that is not its distinguishing characteristic. It is a parser generator for regular languages.
WordPress 2.5 is near release (and MoveableType sucks)
Very important point. That being said, it's not an one-or-the-other issue.

I can do 100% of my UX/UI design in OmniGraffle and then implement it as black boxes on a white page and have a well thought-out easy to use site.

On the other hand, there are so many "pretty" sites that are really hard to interact with.

So, both are important - It seems to me that in the "web 2.0" world a pretty design will get press and get people in the door, and good UX is what will keep people using your site.
Six Sigma: Hardware Si, Software No!
We're not a YC startup, but we found a designer who doesn't typically do web sites -- he specialized in storefronts, t-shirts, skateboards.. In other words, someone who didn't have any predefined notion of what to do on the web, someone whose core skill is to get a message across in milliseconds and to draw people in.

It worked out really, really well for us; it may be worth your while to look outside typical web designers. That said, we already knew what the application flow would be like, so it was a matter of 'skinning' for us -- color scheme, iconography, etc.
Guilt-free Dating For Single Parents
Quite right.

A client (back when I was a teenage "computer hacker", fixing people's computers for pizza money) had the problem that her computer was unstable. It would shut down at random times. Printing stuff at night only would do it; shortly after printing, the computer would shut down. Also, it would shut down when it was cold, and only restart when the house was warm. And while things would be fine if she was using it, it would turn off if she went off to do other things (e.g. iron her clothes).

Hard to diagnose, but a wild guess: power issue. Lets try swapping out the power supply.

The real first problem: unplugging it. There was a single outlet, with a red/black tree of power strips/extension cords plugged into it. Not just computer equipment, it was also plugged into a space heater, air conditioner, alarm clock, coffee maker, etc.

After plugging all the crap into a different outlet, I unplugged the computer and opened it up. Didn't have a power supply with enough watts. Promised to get back to her in a day or two.

When I called her back, everything was fine. The "teenage hacker" solved her computer problem, stopped her lights from flickering, and made her alarm clock stop turning off whenever she vacuumed.

The problem: 1 socket, about 3000 watts. When it got cold, she turned the space heater on. Computer drained of power, switches off. Print something at night, switch on a 500 watt halogen lamp, computer shuts off.
Omnidate is a dating site, where you choose a virtual person to represent you in a 3D restaurant or bar. By going through a virtual dating experience allows you to relax, have fun and really create a bond with a person before meeting them in real life.
Techcrunch says 15k of funding so if they've had an angel round it hasn't been announced. It could also be a small angel round. At this point, it's probably not worth spending a large percentage of their bank account on the domain. The dropbox.com domain owner also might want a number that is close to their entire bank account balance.
The Google Enigma
Why are you commenting on things you haven't even read? No, wait, I said that wrong. Stop fucking commenting on things you haven't even fucking read.
Hacker News Integrates with iPaper
Because this is a more interesting conversation than the grandparent comment --- what's the difference between a lexer generator and a parser generator for regular languages? What can I do with Ragel that I can't do with a (probably clumsy) application of Flex?

I don't mean to snipe at Ragel, just Shaw's use of it as an amulet against vulnerabilities.
Terrible business...1&1 and similar hosts killed all of the margins.

I was basically given a hosting business with 50 clients when the owner didn't want to maintain it anymore. Even paying another company to do support, we had so many issues: credit card chargebacks, customers complaining about things that aren't our problem, server issues. I think at one point I figured I would be making less than minimum wage with the time I put into it (with no hope of growing out of that). We eventually sold for a paltry amount just to wipe our hands clean of it.

The only time it is worth it to do hosting is when it's in conjunction with another service...for example web designers often do hosting because a) they work it into part of their contract with a decent rate, instead of the insanely low-margin rates online now and b) since they made the website, if there's a problem they have fewer people to deal with (i.e. vertical integration).
Iterative Filtering for a Dynamical Reputation System
Here's an idea for an innovation: Fix the search page so that if I put in a query and click on "Images", it doesn't blank out my query and make me type it again. Ask.com has figured that one out, at least.
When are recommender systems useful?
kudos!
He once got a Jet as "payment" in kind.
I'm curious to see your design, are you ok posting your URL here?
Testing Hacker News/Scribd iPaper integration
You can define a full grammar for a language and embed actions in arbitrary places. It is compiled to a very fast DFA. Think of it as a yacc for regular languages.

Zed's advocacy for Ragel is really about using parser generators to implement internet-facing parsers.
Sorry, inside joke.

http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/12/is-there-more-to-li...

(Note this is the same paul who asked for more details on the intern, and who came up with adsense.)
I congratulate you for finding a non-web designer who was able to get the job done well for you.

In my experience traditional print designers generally do not do a good job of creating a website design. They don't understand the deal with background images or what is and isn't possible, they prefer to use nonstandard fonts (easily fixed) and they typically don't understand what is and isn't possible with the technology being used.

Here's an example of what a print designer came up with for a website for a client of mine: http://cocunderground.com/fpt.jpg

The original designs looked best in my opinion, but the final (read, compromised) version can be seen at http://freepromotips.com
The Unavailable Path
Just FYI, I can't see your email in your profile. The "email" field is not public by default. You could put your email in the "about" field.
Not in the least. They have every right to enjoy their memories as much as they can.
"... I'm starting to love using Twitter. There is something liberating about the constraints ..."

I've used twitter from Nov2006. Some of the constraints I don't like:

- how they handle urls [0]

- how they handle people who you like but talk to much [1]

The rest is pretty good. Not too much info, uptime ok (well when I use it) and api is simple & works ~ http://twitter.com/bootload

[0] I don't know a good solution but if google created their own shortcuts like tinyurl the web would be a better place.

[1] stacks of quick posts one after the other why not group them by person after a threshold of say 3?
A Sneak Peek at Github's Pricing Plan
Peronally I've gotten a lot more utility out of Friendfeed so far.

Twitter is neat though -- I'm building a site that will scrape replies to a Twitter user called @rating and put them in a database of ratings. The reply just has to look like this:

@rating 5 "Thing Being Rated" Mini-review goes here.

I'll post it when the battle of Rails deployment is over.

I'm 'jraines' on Twitter and Friendfeed.
Ah, the Internet, where people act tough when they're safe behind their computer screens. You're really cool, getting so riled up about encryption schemes and commenting habits that you're typing swear words at me on a forum.

<shaking my head>

I'll say in advance, don't blame me for the downmods -- I didn't contribute a single one.
I run/host a community of Python new entry-level scripters. This seems perfect for them to see so they'll understand a little more about what they're seeing.

I'd welcome any other cheat sheets which you prefer, though. I was actually impressed at the clarity of this one because it's covered a lot of concepts that literally took a few forum posts to clarify for newbies.
Ten Tactics That Could Save Your Online Reputation
Sorry this is unrelated, but I must see the integration in action.

Lorem ipsum pdf:
http://jedidiah.stuff.gen.nz/marbles-presentation.pdf

Hm. Guess iPaper integration ain't in comments. That's kind of sad. Why not?

EDIT: Someone else made a test story that linked to a pdf: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=134854
Being cryptic is bad -- in "secure code" and just about everywhere else. Unfortunately, that's not the point the commenter made at all.

As to your praise of the notion that the author of an open, civilian protocol is making his protocol less secure by revealing what hash functions he's using, well, I'm just going to say that I'm a practitioner too and I've never heard of openness about the algorithms involved as a sign of bad security. Indeed, I've never heard Schneier once make that point, much less hear him make it often and I read Cryptogram almost every month. Sorry, but I'm calling bull on that one.

The only folks who get a pass on not revealing their algorithms are NSA cryptographers who create Type 1 National Security systems and that's only because they have a large, knowledgeable community of cryptographers within the organization that does their peer review, thus obviating the need for vetting their protocols with the greater academic community.
Have you even read the thread?
Short interactive Python puzzle. Did you solve it before the end?
http://kontsevoy.blogspot.com <-- a typical developer's blog. I have an issue with ranting, that's the only thing I constantly want to blog about :-)
I am not a tax lawyer but the issue of foreign taxation is more complicated than 'organize in the caymans and save lots on taxes'. You're still going to have to pay taxes for any business that you do domestically. If you have income domestically you pay income taxes domestically. If you have domestic sales you pay domestic sales taxes. If you have international sales there are all sorts of complicated rules about where those sales must be recognized. Most of the large corps that use this technique are doing it to shield foreign income from US taxation. They can park it offshore and reinvest it internationally without US taxes. Once you bring it back to the states you have to pay income taxes on it (I think you get a credit for foreign tax paid). So if you need your foreign revenue to pay the domestic bills you're going to get hit. Also I believe that a couple of years ago Congress made it more difficult to do this sort of thing after it started impacting tax receipts.
Sure: http://outalot.com

Incidentally, we did get some proposals from other, more experienced web designers, but they all looked too formulaic and, er, web-site-ey.

dkokelley may have some good points, too.. It could've gone very wrong, especially if our site interaction was much more complicated (and surely someone else will think our design is a train wreck anyway ;) ), but I'm very glad that we took a chance on it.

In the end, the key was really that we were all just seeing the vision of what we wanted the same way.

And the site's artwork was designed by: http://nish.net
I wish the article would go into more depth about how FinCEN was used to spot Spitzer's transactions. Was it a person scanning the database, or some algorithm the Feds use to identify suspicious transactions? They say that only transactions exceeding $10,000 are entered in the system -- so then how did they see that Spitzer had many suspicious transactions just below $10,000?

Pmarca has an a partial transcript of Spitzer's conversations at http://blog.pmarca.com/2008/03/life-lessons-fr.html
Essays like this one make us, YC-rejects, feel like not being part of something cool, something new and exciting and much better, while we're stuck out there dealing with "old kind of animals" and the question "why haven't they picked pikluk?" keeps creeping into my mind, and it's not a nice feeling.

I guess it's a natural state of mind of any hacker: to be at the edge, have the best tools, best equipment, use best operating systems, etc. It applies to your investors as well. I'd hate to take an offer from a rich farmer or an oil guy.

Well... enough of YC for today, back to work.
At work I have two 20.5" monitors hooked to a laptop. The main one is horizontal, while the other is rotated vertically (NVDIA drivers let you do that). I use the horizontal for everything, while the vertical one is for code and code only.

It helps a lot.
I think it would be a good idea to have a preference in the user profile to disable the iPaper integration.

Personally, I don't mind getting PDFs or other documents, and I love the way Evince displays them on Ubuntu. However, I can see how many on Windows could prefer to have the iPaper integration on in order to not bother with Adobe Reader.
sorry, but I prefer to be redirected to the original url

maybe there should be a supplementary shortcut to scribd, that would be more reasonable.
Hacker News Over AIM HackerNewsYC buddy
imrobotbuddy.com has mashed AIM + Hacker News. Check out HackerNewsYC buddy on AIM. You can get the latest RSS feed of Hacker News right on AIM. The chatbot checks for updates every 15 minutes.

If only there was an rss feed to the newest links that will be great.
That's my problem with all these online storage things. It's too expensive to save my 150 gigs of FLAC/mp3 on their service. Not even S3 is cost effective.

And I do not want to waste all the time to rerip all those CDs if my computers gets stolen (again), so I finally had to settle for rsync and Dreamhost @ $12/mo for 500 GB, but Dreamhost is far from fast, so it's not perfect.
All are Delaware C Corps
I didn't knew that, thanks a lot for the info.

Edit: just another question.
What about American like saying European?
It does look very similar to the YC sites, but that's not a bad thing at all - it looks very good, intuitive and beautiful.
Discovering many of the beliefs and attributes I had grown and fostered within myself fall within what is described as the Law of Attraction (though I can't say I have as much stock in it as many do). There just seems to be an attitude that people who I see as successful have, and every time I see my attitude relating to theirs, I sit back and think, "wow."
Innovation number 10: Put the article on one page, not 9 different pages. Me being annoyed at waiting for 9 pages to load doesn't make me any more likely to click on your ads!
NO!

Do NOT incorporate in another country if you are a US citizen if your only reason for doing so is to to save on taxes. All foreign-derived income is taxable if you are a US citizen (with VERY few, VERY specific exceptions), so incorporating in a tax haven to save on taxes isn't tax avoidance, it's tax evasion. Avoidance is legal, evasion is illegal.

Setting up a foreign subsidiary should be the only reason you should incorporate in a foreign country if you're a US citizen, and even then only with professional help. There are relatively few tax 'loopholes' that involve tax haven countries anymore, and even they are rather borderline legally and rather complicated. (If you sell physical goods, for example, there are some transfer pricing structures that can save you a bit - but it's only worth it at a certain level of business.)

As rms noted, if you ever get big enough for this to really be a concern it will be easy to find advisors to help you out. Even then, I would advise caution. All of your tax attorney time should be spent maximizing your US deductions,etc. - NOT looking for tax haven gimmicks. Better yet, focus your time on finding new customers and revenue streams. I personally wasted far too much time worrying about tax shelters and similar things when I was younger and I regret it. My time would have been much better spent working on my business. I don't like to see anyone else make the same mistakes.
Nevada also screams shady, and all of the supposed benefits of Nevada (no data share with IRS, etc.) are BS anyway. US startups should always form their business structures in either their home state or Delaware.
Thanks for the heads up.
Not a bad reference for newbies, but this lacks some important things (dictionaries, tuples, list comprehensions, lambdas etc.). Also, the arrow-style explanations don't lend well to a quick-search reference.
I'm @avinashv. Most of my friends tend to use more traditional IM or vanilla email, so I don't use the thing at all.
I can see the reason for footnotes on a long post for meta information, but why do you use them in your little messages? Why not just explain what's in the footnote when you first mention it?

Not an attack, just a friendly question. I've noticed you do this fairly often.

I agree with [1] though; Robert Scoble is the worst offender, seconded closely by Guy Kawasaki. Bundling messages together would screw up the API and break things like twitterific, probably. I wonder if there's a better solution.
My personal portfolio is here:
http://sicret.net

And many good designers can be found here:
http://faveup.com
What about copyright issues?

Do I now need to get the permission of the author(s) before submitting a research paper to Hacker News say?
im obviously partial to http://www.groovr.com but i generally prefer sending and receiving photos, especially form mobile.

other then that, i still use twitter from time to time.
I'm @rosshill

http://twitter.com/rosshill
Now I can download the PDF only if I really want it on my hard disk (which is definitely the rare case). Otherwise the PDF's just like a well-typeset web page. Very slick.
i think this needs to be extended quite a bit, but its a start.
No special consideration for founders?

Why would they stay?
I don't get it. There is no real need for it. I also don't see how you could easily monetize it.
"... Why not just explain what's in the footnote when you first mention it? ..."

good point, I'll see what I can do.

"... I wonder if there's a better solution. ..."

friendfeed does the obvious thing that is it restricts view to the latest 3 by person so as to not clutter the page. Another idea I can think of would be allow you to select who you want to clamp.

"... Not an attack, just a friendly question. I've noticed you do this fairly often. ..."

to stop adding ellipses (that mess up the text especially if there is a lot of them) allowing you to read. This is especially for links or side notes that relate to the main text but is added interest. Also I use hackernews as a scribble ( http://flickr.com/photos/bootload/sets/72157600280904949/ ) for later posts on flickr

"... Bundling messages together would screw up the API and break things like twitterific ..."

No just the display, not the data itself. Just grab the latest submission. If more submissions occur in "N" minutes time frame just display the latest 3, have a click & fetch more if required. It shouldn't break app using the api doing this. Friendfeed does this well.