skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, I think that it can be profitable, especially if going EBook only. There is some great advice on it here:

http://macournoyer.com/blog/2010/03/01/promote-cyopl/

But for me, I didn't want to spend a ton of time and effort on marketing, and my topic was a niche within a niche at the time (I wrote the Ruport Book with Mike Milner -- ruportbook.com).

After a year or so, instead of being thousands in the black, we were hundreds in the red, even though the book sold a few hundred copies. So we just made it available at cost and closed the doors at that point.

This may be because the HTML version was available for free when we started. It may be because we set price points very low (I think our PDF was like $8), it may be because I started an LLC and wasted tons of money on absurd taxes just for keeping the doors open. It was a bunch of epic fail on the business side of things, and that at least taught me a lesson.

I talked to O'Reilly and though they were very inflexible about certain things (due dates, typesetting, etc), they were open to change pretty much everything that mattered to me, and did. As a result, my book shipped early and at a much higher quality level than I could imagine doing myself.

Of course, I could tell you stories about other publishers I either pitched ideas for, did tech editing with, or wrote chapters for that'd make your head spin. So I wouldn't say that professional publishers are good across the board, just O'Reilly pretty much let me run with my ideas and ended up being very accomodating.

This may have something to do with the fact that I blogged and wrote articles with them for a while before writing a book, and because my editor is also a friend of mine from the Ruby community. But I know folks who have pitched O'Reilly cold and had similarly positive experiences, so I don't think that's the case.

Ultimately, publishing is going to be what you make of it. Self-publishing gives you full control, but it also gives you full responsibility. I think you can make money on it if you market effectively, and I think it can be a worthwhile if you really want to do something unique.

But for me, someone who just wanted to get some ideas out there and maybe make a buck or two in the process, doing all of the work of self publishing really was horrible.
Tech4000: Elyria police officer died of gunshot wound to the head.
Unix-inspired systems have traditionally often had the letter X in their name, e.g.: UNIX itself (ex Unics), Irix, AIX, Minix, NeXTStep, Xenix, HP/UX, Linux, Mac OS X in no particular order.

Of course not all do, e.g. Free/Open/NetBSD (though they were originally based on "BSD UNIX"), Solaris/SunOS, etc.
In Stallone's case, persistence led to a great product that he eventually sold. If you already have a great product, persistence may be a signal to customers or investors that you are serious. If you haven't built anything before or have only been at it for a little while, people simply won't believe you -- and why should they? How can you prove that you are serious about your venture?

The persistence is sometimes about patience. My grandmother tells me frequently, "Every business man I know says it took him 5 years to build his business." It takes 5 years, because anything less than that isn't significant in the minds of customers. You need a track record. You need to prove your belief in yourself through your commitment to your ideas.

If you can't convince yourself that your idea is great, why should someone else believe it is great enough to buy and trust to exist for another year or two? If it's existed for 5 years, it'll probably exist another one year, then two more and eventually, it's just always around.

Of course this doesn't matter as much for a simple product that you buy and go, but with enterprise products or products where the customer is establishing a relationship with you, it's important to prove the stability and viability of that relationship.
Wouldn't comparing the actual numbers with a line that represented both inflation and increases in disposable income be most fair?

In which case from my eyeballing:

a) Credit card debt has doubled

b) Personal lines of credit have tripled - but this could be related to an increased number of lines of credit available to people.

c) Mortgages look on pace

d) Household debt has increased about 50%
I use my GPS to plan routes, however, not just to get from A to B.
This is a very interesting whitepaper and makes a lot of sense. Worth reading, especially around here.

The person to innovate in a way that capitalizes on this research is going to make a lot of money.
It's downloadable off the icon.
Wouldn't this quickly run afoul of the SEC? Is this money to be considered equity, a loan, or what? There are many laws to trip over here, especially Federal. I know if I gave such a startup, say, $1,000 and it became huge, I wouldn't want only $1,000 repaid! I'd see myself as an investor for equity and that would invoke the laws governing stocks right there.
You Can't Make Just One Thing
ok, so i think the original thread here is arguing that "being run over" is just the market doing what it would do anyway, without you playing in the traffic and endangering us all...
It's the icon at the bottom: http://www.hackurls.com/hackurls.py
Why aren't there laws against lying? Why isn't this fraud or false advertising? Why are people able to lie to sell? What would the world be like if lying was a criminal act without an oath required? Why is it okay to lie outside the courtroom, but not inside it?
Non-profit hackerspace hit with a hefty tax bill despite tax-exempt status.
Sorry, didn't make it past the modal ad that seemed to be missing any kind of "close" or "skip" button.

Was the article actually interesting?
It seems to be gone now.
It would be cristal clear before you pay the $1,000 what will happend with that money if the company is succesful and how much you would get.
i think for folks doing some combination of clojure, scala, jruby and groovy, netBeans is the path of least resistance. I hope Oracle realizes this, and devotes resources to maintenance, at the very least.
It doesn't render well on Chrome. Firefox works fine.
How can writers prepare for the iPad?
Youtube vids with more details:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGOBR5Z4fSM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPnxjCxBbKY
Method picks a fight with the jug
MongoEngine 0.3 is out
Tracking a Century of American Eating
How will an RMB revaluation affect China, the US, and the world?
The "/" at the start of the second line is a choice operator. For example, this is how you would define a term a that can match either b or c:

a: b / c

(The asterisks in my post were escaped because they were in a code block, or because there were not two of them in the same line.)
Mark Kvamme: "From Mass Media to Media from the Masses"
Thanks for the clarification pg.

I would think that it'd be pretty uncommon to be accepted at the pre-idea stage though, no? I mean, seed funding for literally nothing more than a good team is pretty tough to come by. For FI that's actually pretty common (at least in my experience).
this exists in the form of kickstarter.com, I think as others have mentioned the legalities of investing make the actual investment quite hard, kickstarter is closer to a charity but with the opportunity for startups to give really good incentives to put money forward
I was impressed by the number of interesting concrete ideas he listed for improving efficiency and retrofits. Usually policy at that level is almost entirely focused on enticements to lower levels of government and other types of stick/carrot programs. To see the DoE developing actual technical solutions like software and hardware is very cool.

In the same vein, the FCC has their broadband speed testing tool to gather data and make useful maps of speed vs. price and other factors, all to guide future policy decisions. Maybe this idea of running the executive branch based on data is widespread in the administration? If so, kudos.
I know a guy whose bathroom scale tweets every morning after he steps on it. http://www.withings.com/

Seems a little excessive, but no more so than a toaster with wifi.
I'm not sure the situation is that simple.

Steve Jobs has mocked Apple's competition for pretty much as long as I can remember... and laughed all the way to the bank.
The Google Nexus One is headed to Sprint
Most people elsewhere do not know how to read urls

True, and probably an understatement. Many people, perhaps even most of them, don't know what a URL is, let alone how to interpret its components.

These are the people whose ultimate means of navigating to something is to type its name, or something like its name, into the browser search box. Assuming they pay any attention to URLs at all, they presumably treat (e.g.) the "www.mcdonalds.com" that they see on a print ad as a special magic keyword that can be typed into Google. And so it is.
Why pay any extra $ when you don't have to? Many scenarios will end up with you paying greater than the minimum ($75).
Tim Bray in the Garden of Good and Evil
As a Founder Institute 2009 inaugural graduate I share the same opinion as it was written here. With my strong technical background the training added most valuable information on how to build and run a start-up, which I thought I knew, but I had to learn that I actually missed a lot.

I agree that the course might not be for everyone depending on the business and strategy you try to establish. But anyone who intends to found a company and knows he needs to add on more knowledge in certain areas the training can help tremendously. You also gain a strong network.

But it does not come for free and the 4 months are a lot of work. Listening to these mentors and CEO’s and understanding the stories why they were so successful helps you to use this information and apply on your own. On top you can get short advice from the mentor’s which can be also highly valuable.

What I enjoy now most is the network of the other founders from our course. Founder Institute program was awesome.
Nvidia issues new drivers to solve fan issues, overheating cards
Great post, Ryan! It is always easy to quibble with this or that aspect of how to launch a startup legally, but this is a great roadmap for founders to get them started in their thinking and to keep them focused on the right issues. It is quite consistent with the rest of your high-quality blog.
IMAX Threatens Open Source 3D Engine With Bizarre Reasoning
This is a follow up post to: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1169352
Wow, this will really hurt some vendors.

I personally haven't had much problem with screens getting scratched - though I wish matte screens were available on the 13" MacBook Pro's.
As a former visual/graphic designer, now a stay-at-home father, I have to chime in on this. I've done branding and identity work for some very large companies (e.g. The Coca-Cola Company) so I can tell you that the logo is a very important part of any business strategy.

First, I'm surprised how little respect design gets in the tech industry and from programmers. Good design can sell a poor product or inform consumers about a superior product. It can drastically reduce support costs (UI design) or encourage consumers to pay a little more for a product (i.e. The Apple "Tax"). Design is important to the overall success of most business ventures and should be budgeted for and planned for accordingly.

These logo (I'll be nice here) marketplaces are better than design-it-yourself or no design at all in most cases. But you get what you pay for. Many of the designs will come from students that have little to no experience and an incomplete grasp of the principles of design. Most of the rest will come from international locales far away with different cultural identities and little understanding of yours. After all, a logo is not just something attractive, it communicates a message visually.

What you will get in abundance is poorly thought-out concepts, logos stolen or similar to others and rushed work with a total disregard to overall quality. Does your logo need to be legible from far away or at small sizes? They probably didn't account for that. Some of these logos will land you in court (trademark/copyright violations) and I guarantee the guy that "designed" it for you on these website will disappear.

Bottom line: These logos are great for a placeholder until you can afford a designer, until your product grows or launches or for presentations to investors, etc.
Rackspace is NOT a good place for bootstrapped startups. They are relatively quite expensive and the services they provide towards their low-end clients are nothing like what their reputation is commonly based on (higher end sites).

If you're not comfortable being a sysadmin and your webapp doesn't require a dedicated host, then go with a shared host that can easily scale your allocated resources. If you really need something more demanding, look elsewhere for managed hosting.
It had wonderful tips such as "Design your space with you in mind" and "Get the right tools".
Yeah, it's a shame. The guys over at http://scalewell.com looked into this and it was pretty much impossible to do it legally. So, they're just giving away the money instead.
I've been using Ruby since 2005 and I am a top 100 contributor to Rails (http://contributors.rubyonrails.org/). Rails design suffers for its heavy use of "keyword arguments".

positional arguments for more than two or so things creates connascence of position

Which is precisely the reason that you shouldn't pass more than two arguments to a method (unless you are creating a list or hash for their intended purpose). If you have more than two arguments to a method, it's a sign that you should reify them into an object.

Using block based DSLs so that you can break things down into small functions that each do their part is a good way around this

Why do people love making things complicated by misusing blocks. Just create an object and set slots on it. Blocks are best used for delaying computation, not setting up state.

I think that Zed Shaw's essay on the "Master" and the "Expert" is applicable here: http://www.zedshaw.com/essays/master_and_expert.html
For what it's worth, Richard encouraged his sister Joan to earn a Ph.D. in physics. She worked for years as an astrophysicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. I had the good fortune of having Joan present at my first scientific talk way back in 1994. I was confused on one point, and she patiently explained to me how a magnetotail extending to infinity could still satisfy div B = 0.
PayPal app integrates with Bump (YC09) for mobile payments
The Rules of Extreme Programming
Let me get this straight, I pay them $300 for the exclusive license for pre-made logo.

Considering I can contract out multiple iterations of a bespoke, cross-media, hand-dithered (e.g. newsprint, 4-color, b&w, web, etc.) logo for $1-$2k from full-service design/marketing firms HOW is this a competitive solution?

What project or firm who even tangentially cares about their brand identity would go down this path? Logos typically last the lifetime of the brand (years) and those sunk costs can be easily justified by that lengthy amortization.

Honestly, this seems like a service without a market; at least in the United States.
Here's one problem with screening: A colonoscopy is a $2000+ procedure, and insurance won't always pay for it unless it's medically necessary.

So, if you have a family history of colon cancer and you've entered the age range where screening typically starts, you may be out of luck. Yes, treating cancer is vastly more expensive than screening for it. So why not pay for regular screenings? I think health insurance companies (and employers) probably do a cost analysis and determine that the cost of detecting and catching stage 1 colon cancer in a screening is more expensive than the cost of waiting for it to develop into something that requires treatment, because by that time there's a very good chance that the worker will no longer be at the same company.

I'm hopeful the costs and effectiveness of non-invasive imaging technologies and auto-analysis will come down in the next 10 years to the point where "screenings" can be done for a fraction of a colonoscopy. But, of course, the manufacturers of the current generation of imaging technologies -- the Siemens and Intels of the world -- are perfectly happy with the jaw-dropping price tags that hospitals and clinics have to pay and pass onto the consumer. If some smart startup comes along with a cheaper solution, just buy 'em out or use monopoly muscle to take them out of the picture.

OK, end of rant. Back to our normal programming.
Plain old objects are the best way to make your API design flexible. You can't easily change the behavior of setting a key/value pair for an individual hash. Objects are designed to implement behavior, Hashs are meant to hold key value pairs.
Just finished lunch with my father and got quite a few more details, with some more possibly to follow:

Paul Shumaker was one of the founders of Garmin: he and others had worked together at King Radio before Paul split off with one of them to do microwave system design and development. He eventually became one of the four founders of Garmin (so says Google and my father, e.g. Paul was a part of the team before incorporation and got a minuscule piece of the action). He was their microwave engineering leader, with 23 engineers under him when he retired for medical reasons in 2004.

So contrary to my vague description above and the interpretations in this thread he was there from the very beginning and was a key to their success. (In fact, the superior GPS reception of the specialist companies like Garmin and I assume Tom-Tom would appear to be their key lasting advantage in this market (well, along with incumbency)).

As for Garmin's top dog, my father's opinion of him cannot be published in a family newspaper such as Hacker News ^_^.
Is there a possibility of creating a pool of non-accredited investors that solve the problems pointed out by the second article?
The sandal username on GitHub sounded familiar, so I checked and realised its the same sandal that does the Prawn PDF library:
http://github.com/sandal/prawn

That gives the book some extra credibility in my eyes.

EDIT: OK, now that I've read the foreward, I see Matz himself mentions Gregory's work on Prawn. Doh.
What are the best libraries for generating matrix codes?
As pointed out by other readers Symbian ISN'T the brand that Nokia holds up to their end users. I think it's a mistake to advertise Android to the masses as a brand. Sun tried that with Java and it didn't work because they spent so much of their resources advertising Java to the end user they didn't actually do compelling things with it. Contrast that with Flash where Adobe did compelling things with it, developers wanted to do that, and users loved it. First doing something compelling to attract attention, then you can tell them how you did it. Not the other way around.
What if you live outside of the US?
Have a design company but no good at designing? http://99designs.com/logo-design/store/search?q=design has design company logos for you :-)
There are ways within 99designs to filter the initial mass down to better quality competitors and to stop wasting other designers time, e.g. by eliminating bad designs early. Either way, its not good for a $40/hour designer to be competing against a guy that might only need to win 1 project a month to pay the bills.
James Goldsmith was right back in 1994- look at social indices, not economic! Dude saw the future.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PQrz8F0dBI
Hacking SXSW: Who Needs the Panels, Anyway?
Pavlovian / marketing conditioning
Can you think of any examples of products building on this? (i.e. each time you do this, you remember that)
Mind-bending video proves that one publisher gets it
BTW, people should Google around for Gregory Brown's conference videos to hear him talk about, and demonstrate, assorted instances of good and bad code.
Yeah I should have figured. Just didn't want anyone who didn't know the meaning of High GI to form an incorrect impression.
Do we really want to eliminate lying with a broad stroke? Is ALL lying bad?
At least they are equal-opportunity. http://99designs.com/logo-design/store/2372 is pretty close to Ubuntu. Even if you're working on a design with designers working from scratch, you have to watch out for things like this. One of the designs someone did for one of my projects wound up being pretty nearly a copy of the Space Imaging logo.
This is great for the little mom-and-pop coffee shop type place
All I can say is that he knew it was a bad deal and he nonetheless took it.

One aspect was that he was having trouble finding interesting projects to work on. The JDAM precursor where he teamed with a major aerospace firm was I think lost due to politics. Simple GPS systems were a step or three down from that but were nonetheless more interesting than the other work he had been able to find for some years previous to that (losing the JDAM precursor contract was a last straw sort of thing).
Top under sold Nexus One features
My N900 is almost like the openMoko, but awesome. It has GTK and QT support if you want to hack your own UI.
And if it installed a keylogger or bot awaiting further instructions, wouldn't that also "seem fine"?
Did you know that crowdspring got their logo designed using the our site: http://99designs.com/contests/321

The contest model at 99designs.com does between 550-600 new projects every week - That's dwarfs all other similar sites including CS combined.

Just FYI.

Cheers,
Jason
The only difference being image clarity, 3D? Yes it's improved since then, but so does everything we create. The underlying technology hasn't changed that much. By this logic we should continue to pay 1950s prices for a TV because a cathoray tube today is different from a cathoray tube from 1950. What's interesting about our TVs, VCRs, computers, etc is that not only do they get better, but they get cheaper too. Ever noticed how LED and plasma TVs existed before 2006, but it wasn't until their price dropped below a certain level that everyone started getting them? Point being that these technologies have to come down in price before we can scale them to a large audience. Right now they cost way too much, and are not available to a large enough audience to really start making health care better overall. Lowering disease prevalence, raising life expectancy, etc.
Ask HN - What Virtual PBX Do I Use
I'm looking to ditch Vonage VOIP in our small office (less than 10 employees). I'd like to migrate to a VOIP/Virtual PBX system. Grasshopper looks nice but we need to be able to send/rcv faxes from a "real" fax machine as well as have "real" phones ring (as opposed to cell phones, etc). Any recommendations?
Hacker Disables Over 100 Cars Remotely
Please forgive the typo :)
The per-capita numbers wouldn't be as dramatic. Canada's population grew by 10% between 99 and 09.

Also saying that "Canada is fiscally prudent" is true if we consider only the Public debt (which excludes household debt). France has the opposite problem, the state is a big spender and households are financially prudent. A country's finance doesn't necessarily reflect its citizens financial habits.

This is still a worrying picture for Canada...
The advantage of PEGs is that they are easily understood, easy to code, and easy to code for. In 99% of applications nowdays, these are the only considerations. Performance is a secondary concern or not a concern at all. Given this, the user shouldn't have to worry about backtracking, ambiguity, or lookahead.

Asking the user to have to worry about this stuff, when he doesn't have to, is not good software design. Not all of us are writing high performance parsers for complicated languages.
The artificial distinction between “content” and “delivery”