skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are close to a dozen US angel investors in a company I co-founded in Canada - to my knowledge (and I'm pretty sure it would have come up) none of them had to go through anything particularly onerous in order to give us money.
Two of those angels also sat on our board, and were pleasantly surprised to find out the difference in liability as board members between Canada and the US.

Previous startups I have worked for in Canada have all gone south of the border to raise either VC or Angel funding, so I suspect that this problem is somewhat over hyped. That said, everyone likes to remove friction (and accounting/legal costs) from raising money, so the change in law is a good thing.

As another aside, a Canadian company can multiply investment (certainly at the level of Angel investment) by as much as three times thanks to various Canadian R&D programs (IRAP and SRED), and Canadian investors usually qualify for the lifetime capital gains exemption, which can make an exit even more appealing (who doesn't love a tax break?). So there are some good reasons to invest up here.
Latest and Best tools for sharing videos on Twitter
Filed under: BetIWontNoticeAnyDifference
No problem: take the same technology, rebrand it have a "business-oriented" name, make a different landing page, then sell both versions.
In that light, it's useful to compare reviews of books you have already read with your own assessments of those books. That way you can get a sense of which reviewers are more likely to write future reviews that will dovetail with your own values and expectations.
Ask HN: Recommendations on how to run an open source project?
Anyone have good recommendations on how to run an open source project? or books I should read?
My Thoughts on the NoSQL Database “Tea Party” Post
Read all the way, it's got a good punchline.
Amazon S3 Storage Cloud Now Hosts 100 Billion Objects
I think you are looking too much into this.

It's likely he was intrigued by the place because of the movie, checked it out, liked it and decided to move.

I'm sure he didn't head for the airport when the credits rolled.
Most Weird ID cards and Passport Photos
Why, when you know you should be motivated to [...] write the blog, do you sit there instead, with the motivation sucked out of you, reading Twitter?

Haha, you wanted to make a timesink for others, but instead got sucked into one yourself! That's karma for ya.
It also seems like the suits that people hear about are the ones involving the hot new companies, which happen to be those who are gaining relevance but haven't yet established their position and thus are still interesting.

So we have patent trolling targeting interesting companies on the rise, and the media selecting for stories about interesting companies on the rise. It could definitely be causality in the other direction.
Hmmm, I should also point out that a lot of this has to do with whether you have a liquidity ("It's a Wonderful Life") or solvency problem. There are a lot of short term fixes you can justify for the former that for the latter work only if the surviving institutions can earn their way back to solvency ... until which they're zombies.

The Austrian School is dedicated to zombie killing ^_^.
Hunger by Knut Hamsun,
Wait Until Spring by John Fante,
Post Office by Charles Bukowski,
The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Cary,
The Outsider by Colin Wilson,
The Price of Greatness by Arnold M. Ludwig,
Touched With Fire by Kay Redfield Jamison

Just off the top of my head without any ordering.
But it requires flash player :P

I think the real point is that the technology is evolving in modern browsers to new points where someday in the future it will be standard and free unlike flash.
If you have a degree and a job offer, as a Canadian you can apply for a NAFTA visa at the border - it's not a sure thing, but it usually isn't that much hassle.
may well be true, my source is an old State of the Onion talk from Larry Wall, which although a linguist is probably not the most qualified in the world :)
I do think a lot of our ideas can apply to a very broad spectrum of businesses.

I've personally heard from thousands of business owners in just about every industry who've told me many of the ideas we espouse work beautifully for them in their businesses.

But, no of course I don't believe any idea applies to everyone.
I have had success gaining fans for my Facebook page using Facebook ads. I targeted my ad to people who fit my niche and I gained fans fairly quickly. I also made sure to keep my fan page fairly active by posting there on a regular basis.
Looks like the formal name for what I was trying to do. Now I know what to google!
The problem is when you're the sole bread winner with 3 kids...When I was much younger I chucked it all and spent a year biking through South America. People asked me how I could leave everything behind - and my response was, "what behind?" I had no girlfriend, no fancy stereo (pre-ipod days)a VW bug, whose steering wheel would loosen up after every few hundred miles, so it was easy to leave it all behind because I didn't have much to start with. So my advice is don't wait - take risks when you're young and the consequences aren't that great and your cash flow needs are fairly limited. Don't wait because it doesn't get any easier.
Actually, the WTF is that nobody bothered to mention (or ask) that only a single employee used the system.
this is the kind of argument which was used to demonstrate how inadequate pcs where compares to mainframes in the 80's.

Apologies for any snarkiness :) but we are going to hear about how much canvas sucks compares to opengl whatever until it surpasses it, and probably still then.
It absolutely is BS, but—for whatever reason—it works on me.
Practical advice from a man in the trenches. Recommended.
the cathedral and the bazaar I think its pretty much a must read in this respect.

but its a pretty vague question, anything more specific?
If you apply Ockham's razor in the form "prefer hypotheses with lower Kolmogorov complexity" together with Bayes' theorem, you get something that in a certain (rather artificial) sense is as effective a problem solver as anything mechanized can be. Unfortunately it's unimplementable in practice, because ...

Coming across AIXI was what got me interested in algorithmic information theory. It is indeed useless in it's "pure" form, but there's a variation using Monte Carlo search that apparently does pretty well: http://arxiv.org/abs/0909.0801

(This is controversial, but it's my opinion and that of at least some other contributors here.) When assessing (e.g.) scientific hypotheses for "simplicity" or "parsimony", something like Kolmogorov complexity is the Right Way to understand (un)simplicity; failure to appreciate this is, e.g., what makes some people dislike the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics on the grounds of extravagance, or think that "God did it" is a useful explanation for otherwise-surprising features of the universe.

Yes. In fact after reading the Less Wrong quantum physics sequence (http://lesswrong.com/lw/r5/the_quantum_physics_sequence/), I find that "the wavefunction collapsed" and "God did it" are remarkably similar statements.
He could have gone one step further and created a .kml file for a virtual tour in Google Earth. That would have been impressive.
Understanding a single scientific paper is easier than many people think. Understanding something like the temperature trend from 1850, or the growth trend in artificially-bred corn over the last 100 years, is pretty easy, requiring little more than grade-school arithmetic.

But in my experience, people don't want to merely understand the existence of that trend. They want to understand the broader ideas of climate science, evolution, medicine, etc. That means understanding where the data comes from, what sort of filters have been applied, what principles account for it, how those principles have been lab-tested and on what scale, etc.

It's that sort of understanding that's hard.
I, for one, didn't know LA was like that. Granted, I also wasn't looking, but I can't think of one of my classmates that moved out there from here over in the East.
I remember a conversation where I actually said "I don't think I would take 5 million dollars (for my first startup) if someone offered it to me today." Man, am I glad I didn't actually turn down a 5 million dollar offer. LOL
Actually, it looks like the blog is having problems. The direct link seems to load fine.
Can we have part #17 and part #73 of the conversation some other time, please?

I just wanted to know where the measurement data was. That's it.
Sounds like a bad idea to me too ... but apparently X64 TCO on CLR 2 was considered an optimization, not something that changes the semantics ... so the DEBUG/RELEASE split has always been in there, and now it's a matter of backwards compatibility ... since it can change the stack-trace and in DEBUG-mode you expect the full trace.
ALA: Web Standards for E-books
He just seems kind of ignorant really. My experience is certainly limited to the west coast, but I've been around for a while both as a founder and early stage employee in plenty of startups, and I've yet to see one that didn't eventually take US based investment. Our biggest problems is that there aren't enough local angels and the local VCs aren't all that great - which is why everyone past a certain stage goes south to raise funds.

And this is great news, as it will make pitching those investors easier.
Yeah, the guy just told me his blog is not responding now. Oops! I must rethink speedbumping like that in future.
Check out my posting Product Adoption: Lessons on how to maximize product adoption and avoid common pitfalls: http://kevinjmireles.wordpress.com/2006/08/03/product-adopti...

I appreciate the encouragement and challenge to write some more. I'll see what I can do to live up to your request but no guarantees as I'm trying to put some of the lessons to use=).
That is pretty neat: the author wrote a Clojure wrapper for part of the OpenNlp library in his last blog post, and in this post he uses the wrapper in a search application.
Ideally, I'm paid to my level of competence, which means I work all day. I'd have to be a moron to produce many times more then others for the same reward.
My 8 year old is enjoying Scratch immensely. (As am I.)

Without any instruction, apart from two tutorials from YouTube, he has made a number of exploratory programs.
I cannot recommend it more highly then seeing him dancing in delight as he showed his mother how the flying bit of doodle (made with the in-skin paint widget) that shoots from the mouth of the cat makes the stick men 'ghost'.

He set up broadcasts, loops, events, and keyboard control, all on his own
Getting started with Lift (video and slides from a talk)
Well i'd hire her if I was in SF :-)

This is how you get a job.
Money = resources.

If you need extra money to run your solar plant, that means you are consuming more resources than a comparable plant.

Which means you are not "green". And often means it actually can take more energy to make solar power than it returns.

The only reason to do this is to spur research into solar energy that might eventually reduce the resources required. But this isn't really the best way to do that.
Or it can influence your competitors toward a direction that you think is less harmful to yourself: http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2010/03/09/apple...
I've had some good times playing with Scratch with my 3.5-year-old. We made some games where she can press buttons to make characters on the screen move around and do things. I show her the list of sprites and let her choose some. She decides what they should do ("I want the cat to roll over") and I write the code, with feedback from her. I guess I'm really training her to be a development manager. :)

I haven't tried it yet, but the video presentations I've seen of Microsoft's Kodu look really fun: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodu

She also likes TuxPaint (http://www.tuxpaint.org/) and other drawing programs. It was SuperPaint on the original Macintosh that first got me into computers...
It may be a different product but it's still in the same market for people who want to lend out their money. The different interest rates are because of different perceived levels of risk; normally a government can offer less because they're viewed as more likely to return the money.

If they aren't in the market or to the degree they are less so, investors have no choice but to put their money elsewhere.

As for your question, I don't think we can easily say. E.g. the BLS says the dollar lost 28% of its (CPI) value from 1940 to 1946 ... but I'm not willing to assign blame due to the discontinuity of WWII.

If Japan defaults in its 3rd Lost Decade, will that be the cause of the initial '80s panic or decades of the wrong medicine to deal with it?
Sorry if we're still appearing hostile. We have a very focused target audience -- people doing mathematical research -- and in order to serve that community best we turn away questions at inappropriate levels (i.e. what should be 'standard material' of a mathematics undergraduate education at a good university). We try to do that politely, and offer suggestions of other places to try, but I know we don't always succeed.
These are great tools. I am particularly interested in how affective check-ins are at bringing in new customers. Foursquare has the data to show who the real social influencers are. Some users may not help, but some could bring dozens of friends with one check-in.
I think they need to do more. They need to put the CEO in jail and set an example.
Fail quickly doesn't mean let your company fail. The goal is to figure out what doesn't work.Too many people try to develop a perfect product, etc... instead of investing the minimum amount required to get feedback and test the concepts with customers, stakeholders etc... It's better to discover that your great idea won't work with a paper sketch than to discover the issues after you've invested 6 months in development.

So fail quickly is about taking risks, making mistakes and learning as rapidly and as cheaply as possible - so ultimately you can be successful in the long run.
Can you actually live in the area on $12/hour?

Also, someone should teach her about salary negotiation. Stupid to box yourself in like that. She'll probably end up working for $10/hour.
this is the kind of argument which was used to demonstrate how inadequate pcs where compares to mainframes in the 80's.

So you mean '80s mainframes were actually PCs, but they had a faster virtual machine, better language support and a more expansive standard library? Because, you know, both the Canvas demo and the Flash demo run on the same hardware...

Don't get me wrong, I really like Canvas. But it's harmful to pretend that it's a Flash replacement, when Flash still does a lot more and also has authoring tools that allow actual content to be produced by design professionals.
You and I have a different definition of "semantics" when it comes to programming languages. Your code still achieves the same result, just in a different way. That requirement - equivalent outcome - is how compilers decide what optimizations it can and can't perform. This is often stated as "optimizations can't change program semantics."
This is nice, but there are many more HTML5 examples at http://www.chromeexperiments.com , and most of them are much more "amazing" than the linked app.
I'm just getting into Twitter for my business, and finding that as I give so I do receive. Depending on your vision will determine how scalable this model is - I'm shooting for 100 followers this week and 1000 by July 1st, and not all of this will be doable at that scale.

1) Sent the first few tweets that explained who I and the company are.

2)I followed x number of people who looked interesting and relevant to my business. Many of them followed back (very few auto-followed)

3) I installed TweetDeck to sit in the background when I'm online (and not in do not disturb mode) - there are often questions or observations from someone I follow that I can contribute to. I reply, and so far, most times I do they tweet a thank you, and I get 2-3 signups within 10 mins from their followers.

4) When I get a new follower, I have a quick look at who they follow or who follows them, for new leads to repeat Step 2.

5) Next step is to Direct message all new followers. In your case, that might be linking to your Facebook page?

A note on Facebook pages - it takes me four clicks after I log in to access my own fan page. The likelihood of me doing that for any other business? Nil.
Seriously, this is a rather typical old-economy response to a well understood concept at this point: Simple works.

Coming from the inside of the enterprise web publishing world I'd suggest it's not 37signals that is missing something.

Of course the author (of the review) did found a chain of restaurants...
Getting people to change their habits is hard. After all shouldn't you be going to gym instead of watching mindless videos on Youtube? But are you? Read my post for some key product lessons http://kevinjmireles.wordpress.com/2006/08/03/product-adopti...
You should check out Launchpad (https://launchpad.net/).
There should be a site that highlights truly fucking awesome people looking for jobs and has an actual insight into them (plus what they've built). I'd hire those people.
It seems to me that the TailCallHelper is just a trampoline ... the method wanting to do a tail call places on the stack a reference to the next method to be called + it's arguments, returns, and then TailCallHelper calls it.

So yeah ... you have a guarantee, but it's also using stack space, so you have to watch-out for big arguments lists, because that may overflow the stack.
Using Advanced Segments to Guess Amazon aStore Performance
Software for collision repair shops....
Latest first ever iPad commercial
>> continuously trolling the depressing opportunities on Monster/NYU Careernet/Craigslist.

Is this system broken? Is there an opportunity for improvement in the way people find jobs, or is the best way to find good work going to increasingly be by performing memorable stunts to get eyeballs from prospective employers? I'm curious, especially in light of the relative lack of successful startups in the area.
old guy doesn't approve of 37 signals, shocking.
ELMUNDO.ES | TRADUCTOR
Well, it does exist, you just have to go back to the original sources, e.g. the meteorological organizations of the various countries, militaries, etc.

As far as I know, the position of the CRU is that they have no original unmodified raw data anymore. Don't know about NASA and NOAA.
I don't think that they're talking about adding this at the language level. Nothing is changing in the C# spec for this, for example. This is just talking about the kinds of code that the optimizer and JITter are allowed to generate on the back end.
+1 for Hunger

my recent favorite: Nikolski by Nicolas Dickner
Thanks to the both of you - reading up on it now.
I never said that 90% of "successful people" had not earned it. I said this of 90% of the ruling class. Most are born into it.

By definition, someone who is born into the ruling class and turns out to be an idiot is not "successful". So most of the people I'm decrying are not "successful" people. However, they are powerful. George W. Bush comes to mind.
Similar previous discussion - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=199722

Which, in turn, included links to these previous suggestions - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=176710, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=110899, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=85840
You have to write R2L parsing logic anyway, because it's what you want most of the time (e.g. "div span a.quote"). Yes, in the special case where #uniq identifiers are used and you know the page to be valid (X)HTML and you know that you get a substantial speedup by filtering on the #uniq node first L2R parsing is preferable. But how realistic is that, really?

Isn't it just easier to teach web developers to write their DOM selectors in a specific way? The R2L approach is (a) easy to understand (b) has predictable (and stable) performance (c) doesn't malloc (d) is easy to implement. I see this as a simple case of "good enough".
"Simple works". Which is why they created everything with Forth on Rails. Oh wait... it's Tcl on Rails. No... Ruby? Ruby is not simple. It's actually a nice mix of elegance, simplicity and, where called for, fancy ways of handling complexity.

And they host everything on DOS. Because it's simple! No?

I think this stuff goes both ways... you can't just wave "simple!" around.

If you really wanted simple, you'd use a pencil and paper.
"When we were talking to investors, we created custom (private) pages for each investor we were courting giving them a ton more to dig through and get excited about if they wanted. The emails were short and sweet with a “want to learn more” link at the end. We used Google analytics to track which people clicked through and which individual pages they clicked on so we could know what to focus our discussions on when we met them."

This is fucking brilliant, Tony.
Funny timing since iPad pre-orders start in a few days which is taking a different approach than the Alto
No easy way to host digital media without setting up a website? Are you serious?
Speedbumping?
I'm not quoting it an an authority - I'm making the concise point that colloquially she's known for fabricating or over-embellishing her stories.

Dude.
This is what I think about Dinner Parties:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuNON9uXLo4

please don't down vote
I agree. I forwarded it on to someone I know in SF who blogs for a TV station there.
Ask HN: Hacker News meetup at SXSW?
Who from HN will be at SXSW? Anyone want to help organize a Hacker news meet/drink/tweet-up?

I'm a recent transplant to SF from Austin, and a multi-year-repeat attendee of SXSW, so I'd be happy to recommend locations, events, etc.. especially for those who are staying through SXSW music (HIGHLY recommended).
I play on a computer because I prefer a keyboard and mouse.
Google is in the middle of an insane acquisition spree
> Well, the last time it was on one of the senator's websites.

That's better than nothing, but if you looked at a Repub senator's website, you're unlikely to see all Repub proposals, let alone Dem proposals. The reverse is also true.

> I ignore what a politician says and look at the actual documents. I admit, lately, it has been really hard to get ahold of bills. I worry about the urgency that doesn't let a bill be posted and reviewed before voting.

I agree with all that.
Sounds great. Let's make it happen. Could I suggest a day thing rather than evening as the sched is already jam packed.

What about coffees at Halcyon/etc?
Don't just upvote -- leave your name!
I started programming in GWBasic and I think that's what drew me into programming.

I have long argued that the best language to start programming is one that has minimal setup and has very immediate feedback.

Compare the classic hello word C program, compiling and linking then running to the simplicity of a GW Basic session:

gwbasic.exe
10 Print "Hello Word"
Ok
(F2)Run
"Hello Word"
Ok

Of course back in the day all we had was text interfaces so my exceptions when writing my first program where low. Now a days usually kids want to start programming the same kind of 3D games they play, which is not something that you will be able to do in a couple of hours.
An international crowdsourcing marketplace
Gary Lauder's new traffic sign: Take Turns
IMO decades of the wrong medicine in Japan's case. In the case of an Argentina where a ton of crap hits the fan and they default a year later, it's a lot harder to blame the medicine.

(regarding Japan -- the consensus is that they didn't do enough stimulus, and that in addition to their high savings rate is why they fell into a deflationary spiral. the government printing money and handing it out with coupons for blow and hookers would have been a better strategy than what they did)