skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's fair to say that you should consult a tax professional before forming a legal entity; however, it's also important to have a general understanding of each entity types' cost/benefit. There's plenty of info on the web.

Additionally, for purposes of this discussion, legal entities are formed exclusively under state laws. While you can incorporate anywhere, most states require a registered agent be present domestically. You can hire firms like CTcorp to fill this role. The second consideration is your "physical" location. What constitutes nexus (especially for technology companies) is the subject of some controversy, but the specific legislation varies among states. Generally, nexus for income tax occurs in the locations where value is generated. This usually means the location of a firm's assets and employees. Sales tax nexus is even more ambiguous. Here's a better explanation than I could ever give: http://web.archive.org/web/20021001165628/http://www.aicpa.o...

Treatment at the federal level is uniform. Imagine that a significant portion of HN visitors are located in CA, so skmurphy's advice is worth paying attention to!
Thanks, really appreciate it!
But http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/second_edition/html/types... says

> The built-in integer operators do not indicate overflow or underflow in any way. The only numeric operators that can throw an exception are the integer divide operator / and the integer remainder operator %, which throw an ArithmeticException if the right-hand operand is zero.

Maybe it's true that subexpressions can't be reordered for other reasons, but offhand I can't find that restriction.
It's more than just an indication: "we [Amazon] will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms" ( http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/01/technology/companies/01ama... )
>Flash apps are locked into the Flash runtime, further locked into whatever platform assumptions you make about performance, etc., and the developer tools are considerably more expensive than $99. You don't get the distribution or sales channel of the App Store (which in spite of all it's faults is still a very valuable thing). If you're developing games, you're going to be giving a cut to whatever sites you're hosted on, etc.

Actually you can use Open source tools to develop flash apps, like OpenLaszlow. And it's not like there are no distribution channels for your flash app, after all the internet is free and open (as long as you're not in China).

I don't really give a damn what's good for Apple. All I know is that there are existing apps I want to use, and I want to use them on my iPhone. I don't care which way makes apple more money.

> Yeah, but we're not really talking about the desktop when we talk about Flash. We're talking about the web, and the web is increasingly used from machines that aren't desktops or laptops. Flash may be installed on 98% or so of desktops and laptops, but if you include "all devices capable of using the web", Adobe's share is much lower and is actually shrinking, and not just because of Apple's products. In terms of who you can reach, Flash is on much shakier footing than most people realize.

And yet there are still flash apps that I want to use that aren't available on the iPhone.

Please understand my concern is not whether this decision was a great decision for Apple. I'm only concerned about whether or not Apple is serving my needs, and whether or not blocking flash is a way to increase their profits or my enjoyment.

And frankly I believe at least part of Apple's intentions in blocking flash is to lock you in their own proprietary platform: the app store.
If Hulu or Netflix (which uses Silverlight) were to make a native application for iPad would Apple approve it? I don't know. Neither Hulu or Netflix could make an application without approval of both Apple and their content providers.
If associativity and precedence are "natural", shouldn't there be near-universal agreement?

I mention that because the standard argument against lisp notation is ....
Sure, but the fundamental value of the share obviously goes down at the instant the company pays out a dividend, so the expectation is that the companies price will drop.

Since everyone expects it to happen it generally does.
It's a bit of a low blow on the author's part, as in perl, "+" is not "a generic addition operator that can be overloaded to concatenate strings", it is literally the "numeric addition operator" and both sides of the + will be coerced as needed to turn them into numbers. The default for strings is to parse them as numbers ("10" + "20" yields the number 30), and a string that doesn't start with a number defaults to zero.

If Perl does anything wrong here, it is in not throwing a type error at runtime but just silently coercing the number. Compare with Python:

Python 2.6.4 ... linux2
Type "help", ...
>>> "30" + 2
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: cannot concatenate 'str' and 'int' objects

(Using "use overload" may let you do further crazy things with +; I'm just talking about the default definition of the operator.)

Incidentally, the string equivalent of + is ".", the dot. There's a parallel hierarchy of operators in Perl for numbers vs. strings, which is part of why Perl has so damned many operators. Woe betide the developer that says "==" instead of "eq" accidentally....
Compare it with Esperanto: At best it's really easy because the word you want to learn shares a lot of morphemes with some European language that you know, and at worst there's no similarity to any language you know. If you are Chinese it sucks all the way, but if you are Portuguese or Polish or English you can sort of guess what unknown words in Esperanto means, you can guess, you can wing it. It's biased towards European languages that way, and that is something the article about Lojban pointed out that they wanted to explicitly avoid when creating it.

But the result of their statistical average method is that everyone has to look up and memorize every single root word when learning Lojban. It might be easy to memorize them because of the simple spelling and that you know they're all five letters long, and that there might be letters in common with the word in your native language, but you have to do it for each of them.

Noone can look at a Lojban word and guess what it means, regardless of your language background. You have no chance at guessing it correctly, you can't wing it, you can't speak pidgin Lojban, you either know the root word for something, or you don't, and if you don't you have to look it up. If the root words had shared morphemes with other languages, then it would have been easier for some people and harder for others, but since it doesn't share with anyone, it's hard for everyone.
Not HackerJobs, but perhaps http://job4dev.com/jobs ?

Free to post listings, as long as the there is information about the company that is hiring. People can browse companies and listings by tags. Just put a "ycombinator" or "startup" tag there, and I'll approve it quickly.

Users that would like to get more details before applying can do so by registering and letting a comment on the listing page.
I totally understand. In the flurry of it all we've all forgotten what you remembered: Apple never said anything to the point of "No SDK. Ever."

Aside from Jobs' WWDC 2007 address there were rumors and signals that "web was all you're gonna get"[1][2], but obviously they planned an SDK that eventually was announced 9 months after the reveal. Or developer pressure convinced the staff to polish the internal tools and APIs for public use? I'm kind of sad that with the new secretive Apple, we'll never know the full story behind the scenes for a long long time to come.

[1] http://theappleblog.com/2007/06/11/tab-wwdc-2007-live-covera...

[2] http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2007/10/source-iphone-sdk-...
If he were a master of controlling perception we would not be having this discussion.
We are 1% of 1% of the people he cares about.
UN climate panel relied on bogus rainforest claim
mxmlc, the free compiler from adobe, does not allow you to use the standard gui controls that their paid compiler does. yes, you can use flex, but there is certainly some kind of reason that adobe added that limitation to mxmlc.

man, why do you people have to turn everything into a pissing match?
I'm guessing you haven't read Provos and Mazières' USENIX paper. In the design considerations, they say:

In general, a password algorithm, whatever its cost, should execute with near optimal efficiency in any setting in which it sees legitimate use, while offering little opportunity for speedup in other contexts.

PBKDF1 and PBKDF2 both rely upon general-purpose hash functions, which are much faster in dedicated computing environments such as FPGA or GPU clusters. The Eksblowfish algorithm at the heart of bcrypt is extremely resistent to optimization.

This is crucial for password storage, since if a CUDA implementation is 3-4 orders of magnitude faster than the implementation your application uses, you've just chipped off a huge chunk of the advantage offered by your hash function.
Except that dividends are announced well in advance so if the price did drop automatically on the day the cash is paid out, it would be trivial to short the position.

The fact is, there is nothing predictable in the stock market.

edit: as BobbyH points out, my point about shorting is mistaken but that does not change the key point about unpredictability of the markets vis a vis declaring a dividend.
Sure, dividends lower the stock price in practice. Lots of mutual funds even warn about timing purchases right before dividends. The phrase you'll want to google for is "buying the dividend".

http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/137.asp
"what parts of flash are not open?"

The source code of the Adobe Flash plugin, if nothing else.

Incidentally, that does bring to mind one possible Hail Mary that could work: Open source the Flash player(s). Whether the open source community could fix performance issues on Linux and OSX depends on a lot of things, but they could certainly fix some things that would make it less aggravating.

(Since it's probably impossible to open source as-is due to licensing agreements it still might not work; depends on how much of the plugin is still left after you've removed those bits.)
I hope some good science and engineering are coming out of this, because American taxpayers have been pouring money down the fusion rat-hole for over 40 years. From my ignorant layman's perspective, I just don't see recovering more usable energy than the energy put in happening. It's been "30 years away" for the past 40 years.

Not everything is a matter of time. I'm not saying man's ingenuity won't figure it out, but the only place nuclear fusion takes place in nature is in stars, and that's powered by the pressure of a huge amount of mass, which can never be recreated on Earth. There has never been a goal-oriented technology project that has lasted this long, spent this much treasure, and produced so few results. Even brilliant people can engage in wishful thinking.
I've been in this kind of situation, but with less expertise on the client's side.

My (successful) angle of attack was to review the documentation provided as a kind of "requirements dump" rather than a "this is how it should work" definition. I then applied my own knowledge and experience to generate a document that said "these are the features you asked for, here's how to provide them in a user-centric manner."

As your client apparently has the IA and graphics person on their side, you may be more constrained. I'd still put forward some ideas, in a conversational manner. Two reasons for this. First, maybe I have a better idea than them. Second, it shows that I'm more than a code monkey (or a bunch of code monkeys calling itself a consultancy).

The work product should include some idea of how you're going to attack the problem, and a sense of how long it'll take (fixed bids are for the devil), and prioritization based on client requirements and prerequisites that those requirements may have.
The author, in an adorable little attempt to wear big-boy pants[0], seems not to know that '<' is a message passed to a receiver. You can even redefine it if you like.

Better pseudo code would be

1.lt(2).lt(3)

In fact, this is correct (albeit ungainly) ruby code

1.<(2) # true

and so

1.<(2).<(3) # Say wha ... ?

makes no sense.

[0]: Yes, a cheap shot.
Ironically, it quotes incorrect answer to the "why manholes are round?"
Catching up with the web (thanks HN)
This is basically a cover of my weekend testing on HN/Reddit. I wanted to learn what attracts people in terms of keywords, pretty mspaint pictures, and articles. Even if the article isn't very relevant to the site, I knew I could get views. I just had to word things right and present material that interested a wide range of people. It was also a lesson in building up e-confidence, and the realization that "what is the worst that can happen?" I've seemed to miss quite a bit of what is going on in the web, but I hope to jump in and donate a little something back in the future.

Overall, it has been an exciting weekend. Thanks HN!
I'm familiar with cperciva's scrypt, and I think it's a great solution. That said, I've only seen C and Ruby bindings for it.

I'd love to recommend its use over bcrypt, as memory constraints are much more expensive than computational constraints, but recommending something most developers don't have access to would result in more weak hashing schemes in production.
Hmmmmm. This would explain it - but for the fact that dividends are generally supposed to be paid out of profits not out of cash in the bank. Aren't dividends a way of sharing profits with shareholders, not sharing the net worth of the company. If a company is not making any profits, it should not pay any dividends.

Your hypothetical example though is a very useful way of understanding these things.
Infact it just helped me understand clearly why companies should keep as little cash as possible - unless they can generate returns better than atleast govt bonds.
I always thought there was an extra B, A at the end.
dschobel, when you short a stock, YOU are responsible for paying the dividend to the person you borrowed it from, c.f. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_%28finance%29

That's why investors can't make an infinite amount of money by shorting stocks right prior to the dividend date...
You just need to turn your "security for Startups" presentation into a nice set of 20 separate blog posts over the course of three months. Don't blog about your products; blog about your expertise and let people find your products. (There's a reason they keep a separate product blog to SvN.)
Unlike most areas of software design, security is adversarial. If you innovate, you are betting your users' privacy on you personally being able to stay ahead of every attackers' ability to find flaws. This becomes unethical if you aren't even familiar with the current state of the art, because some attackers surely are.
Most recently featured in the Benjamin Button trailers:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFk0T0eQonw
"The growing threat from China has led Evans to complain that his agency is being forced to divert manpower and resources away from the fight against Al-Qaeda."

Good.
Somewhat more seriously, that page did introduce me to: http://www.golfscript.com/golfscript/
Open != free.

Lack of openness: a browser plugin that is less stable and slower on Mac and Linux that noone else can fix except Adobe...and only if they choose to do so.

Lack of openness: a browser plugin that doesn't properly utilize cookies on non-IE browsers that noone else can fix except Adobe...and only if they choose to do so.

Lack of openness: a browser plugin that doesn't properly return HTTP status codes on OS X that noone else can fix except Adobe...and only if they choose to do so.
"... without registration" is the phrase then.
randall@gulch:~$ python -c 'print 1 < 2 < 4'
True
randall@gulch:~$ python -c 'print 1 < 5 < 4'
False
Sure, but most cartels fall over time as the players find themselves having divergent priorities. And even now, I'm going to tie myself to Amazon's MP3 store. I just got a Pre Plus and I'm never, ever going to buy a song from iTunes again.
The mistake you're making is thinking of bcrypt as a protection for end-users and their passwords.

It isn't. Bcrypt exists to protect application developers.

A user with a crappy password is getting his account busted one way or another. You're right to point that out. Cryptography won't solve that problem.

The problem crypto solves is this: a crappy web app that loses its user table is royally screwed if its devs settled for "salted hashes". At the whim of their attackers, hundreds or thousands of their user's passwords are going to hit Rapidshare. That's what the devs will be famous for.

Bcrypt keeps that from happening. You'll get famous behind losing 1000 passwords. You won't get famous behind losing 20.
Cable modem hacker faces up to 40 years in prison
Wow. I'm surprised Amazon didn't leave the hurt on longer, find some way to ensure used stock of the most important Macmillan titles to block revenue to Macmillan, go all out tactical maneuvers on this one. Their not-even two week old impressively ambitious strategy is already cracking and I suspect once one publisher has stiff-armed them, their ability to reel-in the others will be nullified.

I don't really have a team I'm rooting for here, but this is as close as I get to watching sports and the quarterback for one team just got taken off the field in a stretcher 2 minutes into the game. Man, and I thought the final bit of this was going to be Bezos vs. Jobs slugging it out over the future of publishing, now it's looking like it'll underwhelm.
What a bizarre comment. PBKDFn and bcrypt are two very similar approaches to the same problem. If you're married to PKCS/IETF standards, go ahead and use PBKDF2. You're still essentially following the advice of this blog post.
True Ventures is looking for interns graduating in 2011 or 2012 for our summer TEC program this summer in the Bay Area. As a member of our program, you will be paired with one of our companies and spend eight weeks working on a variety of projects both appropriate to your background and skillset and of value to the company. There is a stipend paid for the completion of the summer program.
Really? What is the correct answer?
The idea behind the questions aren't bad. The point of the questions is to see how someone works through a problem. Even if they can't figure out the answer, the way they try to work it out is what is important.

However, a few of these questions have been used so much they have become cliche. Rather than test how someone works through a problem, they merely tell the employer if the candidate has heard it already. Any employer who asks any of these questions is lazy, plain and simple.

That being said, here are the questions (from a later post): http://www.codeslate.com/2007/02/survivor-answers.html
I went camping for two weeks earlier this month and didn't miss the internet at all. The funny thing about internet addiction is that people feel like they will miss out if they don't check their emails, facebook and favorite website 10 times a day. The truth is most of these things can be left for days. I don't own a smart for this reason. I feel that it will just be another unnecessary distraction.

A funny thing about 'Social media' is that it has tended to make me less social. Instead of calling people I'll send a dm or email. Instead of personally inviting everyone to a party it is easier to invite them via facebook. Sure the internet and social media has made communication easier but it has also made it less personal.
So, How Do You Think This Movie Will End?
> 1984 ad featuring Apple as the bad guy?

See Simpsons S20:Ep7. http://youtube.com/watch?v=CZGIn9bpALo
Nearly $1/2 billion load from the Dept. of Energy is helping to keep Tesla going. That's the kiss of death.
The passwords aren't being stored, though; a value derived from them is. In a properly designed system, it is computationally infeasible for an attacker to obtain the original password given the derived value.
To expand, the interviewer in the original interview:

- thought that Facebook's servers would be hosted in their office

- was unfamiliar with the idea of usability studies or tracking eyeballs during usability studies

- was baffled by the idea that facebook would track your clicks throughout the entire site to help determine who your closest contacts were

- was also surprised by the fact that in the cloud, nothing is ever truly deleted

- was surprised to see that facebook employees would have the ability to login as any user in the system
The underlying mechanism doesn't matter if it's wrong.

Those familiar with the mathematical notation would think:

1. '1 < 2 < 3' parses to '(1 < 2) and (2 < 3)'.
2. '3 - 4 - 5' parses to '(3 - 4) - 5'.
3. '3 ^ 4 ^ 5' parses to '3 ^ (4 ^ 5)'.

Ruby's convention is clever, but ultimately wrong, and this is one of the cases.
And create a new problem of more people trying to game the karma system. I think it's best to leave jobs (no pun intended) out of this place.
Going nuclear on Macmillan was a mistake. It made Amazon look like the bully, and I wouldn't be surprised if it scared the other major publishers into standing behind Macmillan.
Yeah, I am not really interested in the music - she's good, I'm just not a fan or anything. I posted it here because I thought the article had interesting insights about branding and media awareness that would be useful to startups.
You have achieve breakeven more broadly -- over the entire pulse, or over the electricity you pull from the grid, or perhaps most properly, including all of the material and labor costs as compared to just taking heat from the fusion reactor in the sky with wind turbines and solar collectors.

As for the simulation of bombs vs power, I think it depends on who you ask; scientists or DOE project managers?

It's interesting, after having left a PhD program in plasma physics (for fusion power,) I have a very different sense of the commercially plausible. All we're really using the fusion for is to create heat, and there are many ways to get heat inexpensively (solar, geothermal, coal, natural gas) that don't involve temperatures of hundreds of millions of degrees, that don't require superconducting coils, liquid helium cooling systems, ultra-high precision machined tungsten tiles, structural materials that are vaguely defined, completely unsourced, untested at the correct neutron fluxes, and rely upon rare earth elements, liquid lithium systems from which we're supposed to do tritium recovery (lithium is really reactive, tritium bubbles up and is explosive and diffuses through walls and embrittles them), liquid lithium walls on the inside of the chamber; high vacuum vacuum pumps, giant particle beams and incredibly non-linear and poorly understood science. You're comparing that to coal and mirrors and holes drilled in the ground and wind, all of which ultimately go into some kind of turbine (which is half or most of the expense!) The benefit of fusion just doesn't seem worth it for anything other than military applications or interstellar spacecraft. And really, we've got a lot to worry about before then...
Slow Growth and Debt: The Coming Government Debt Crisis?
What is the difference, then, between using bcrypt and iterating MD5 10^6 times?
You're assuming everyone posting replies and that the author of the post are all HTML5 fanatics. Have you considered that many of us might have worked heavily in Flash/Flex for years designing website and applications, and that possibly the uprising against Flash mentioned here involves Linux Flash plugins seg faulting with no error messages, crazy Flex binding memory usage, general CPU overload and a horrible debug log policy due to sandboxing? I'd be interested to hear why you think Flash is good. Incidentally, who's using Windows? :)