skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ah, in which case your answer should have been "No. Angel investing only works if you invest in dozens of companies, since chances are any one of them will go under."

Or better still, "No. You should take it all out in twenty dollar bills, box it up and send it UPS to that Expat Software guy." I'd back you up on that one.
That's a great story. You guys are obviously smart and have a good idea. Your weak points would be here:

- Have you fought with your co-founders yet to find out if you could survive such a fight? If all you've been in civil and polite, then you don't really know each other yet

- You have 'options'. Will you have the drive to really push through if things do not go initially as expected?

The impression I am concerned about is that you seem a bit soft and nice, if I may use those word. If I were you, I'd focus on making sure in conveying that you have the capacity to be tough also.
Online Status Anxiety
We made an app. It helps you send emails and track them. We call it PostageApp.
> Edit: As an aside, I've been surprised (though perhaps I shouldn't be) how many of my non-tech friends don't even really identify "Android" as a brand - when I tell people we develop for Android, I often get a blank stare - they don't realize that the Droid, Nexus One, etc. have much of anything in common. A branding failure, on the one hand - but also an opportunity to correct some of these other issues.

I think that's a big plus for Google. "Android vs iPhone" doesn't make much sense since it's a comparison between a platform and a product line (as you essentially stated earlier), but "Nexus One vs iPhone" is something people can understand, and something which (right now anyway) tends to favor the Nexus One (to those who have used neither).
Ironically (and I think this is a legitimate use of the term) I hadn't realized when writing my comment that 'randomwalker' and 'Arvind Narayanan' were one and the same. But I apologize for my misinterpretation. I've read it again, though, and still have to fight the same reaction. Perhaps I'm just prejudiced against the 'open letter' format, as I often see it used in that way.

Still, if you can overlook my misreading, I would love your response. I understand that the example from the FAQ is not central to your argument, but I do think it's important in understanding your worldview. If I provide a tool that can be used, erroneously or not, to create or enable prejudice, at what point have I crossed the line into 'violation of privacy'?
Another notable book missing from that list is "Topology" by Munkres.
Buy 50 servers and start leasing VPS for $19 a month. 1000 clients will leave 20k a month enough to pay a sysadmin and pocket some cash while you monitor everything from hawaii.
Conclusion: only buy Android phones from Google directly :-(
Why did this even need to be opposed? There are tens of thousands, if not more, companies that list "SEO" as one of their services. There's no way the applicant can claim that SEO distinctly identifies the brand under which he sells this service.
Relevant HN discussions from the past:

-http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=108723

-http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=201913
If you take that sort of approach, I would much rather you present the topics in some sort of directed graph format to clearly show which areas depend on knowledge of other areas.

I realize that's a non-trivial exercise and no matter what you did you'd likely catch flack from people that don't agree with your prereqs. However, I think that would be particularly valuable to people who don't know what they don't know.

(edit) I mean non trivial outside of relationships like basic math -> algrebra -> precalc -> calc1 -> calc2
The design turns me off pretty quickly, to be honest. The color scheme does make it difficult to visually parse and obscures design elements like the upvote arrows - a lighter background and some padding on your quote containers would help a lot.

My initial impression of the concept is that it suffers from lack of context - quotes are interesting, but usually only in the context of an existing discussion or topic. For example, in Newsweek or whatnot, their "quotes of the week" page has the quote, and then explains the context it was in. For example:

> "Pie is bad, and we are dedicated to providing a safe and pie-free environment for our children as we move towards the future." -- President Obama speaking to the National Cake Frosters Association

If you could make the design point to sources more easily, so the users feels like it's a lead-in to a piece of content, that may alleviate that issue.

It seems like the niche you could capture would be sort of an expansion what the Twitter trending topics is already - a high-level view of the things being said by interesting people, and what people think of them. I think your concept implements that, but it doesn't really present it to the user. My first impression was "well, it's Reddit, except I have to read more to find something interesting". If you can find a way to present it in such a way that the user is presented with easily-consumable, interesting, relevant information with easy access to context and reactions, it could have some interesting potential.
Monitoring service/server with Arduino microcontroller
The fact that the request is absolutely insane seems to have little to do with whether it gets approved or not.
Not automatically. Someone, in this case Rhea, has to actually do the opposing.
New netbooks are still sold with old versions of Windows. When you're not a single vendor platform there will be differences among products.
The authors mentioned two alternatives to the current form of large-scale release. First, opt-in. Second, contestants submit programs that run on the anonymized data but the contestants do not have access to the data itself. Could either of these approaches contribute to the greater good without compromising privacy?
Windows Mobile Marketplace Policies [pdf]
At some point I need to write a little script that lets you launch with a "shutdown after" somehow. I blew a couple hundred bucks on forgotten machines once. Oops.
1. 18 months
2. No
3. No
4. http://www.browsera.com
When are we going to "touch base"?
I will say that I'm glad to have a few clients who'll throw me something like the Ideal Email.
Lightened the background and increased the padding on the quotes per your request.

Awesome feedback. Thanks.

So here's the million-dollar question: What is the context that the user is browsing? The people who say things? The web site that sourced the quote? The people who posted things? The topic that the quote falls under (you can see the topic -- it's the tooltip that pops up when you hover over the quote)

I'm getting a lot of "get a designer" advice, and I'll cop to being a poor designer any day of the week -- I suck. But even with a designer, you don't want the thing to look like a 747 cockpit. Simply because you can search by something doesn't mean the UI should allow it. With a desire to keep the UI as brutally simple as possible, what do you think is the context people would like to see as a higher-up heading?
I'm a little taken aback by your criticism. Did we even read the same letter? What part of (and I paraphrase) "stay busy, keep a balanced home/professional life, live with positive attributes and avoid the bad ones" did you have a problem with?
Granted the other stuff on the page was off-topic, but Carlo's letter itself seemed like excellent advice to me.
1. Part time since May 2008. Full time since June 2009.
2. Never applied.
3. Not yet. Hope to seek Angel funding soon.
4. http://www.social.com

Would actually be interested in a co-founder. It's hard to get everything done by yourself :)
Nice to see your project!

Agree w/ pclark about need for a designer.

I even have a quote in mind ("the biggest danger of people doing bad things to you is that it will make you paranoid", http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1192160 -- I thought that was pretty good) but really feel no 'win' from signing up and making an account just to give myself the ability to enter this quote. Give me a reason to summon the activation energy, or get rid of the need for it (a la Posterous). Slashdot allows anonymous cowards, maybe you should too?
Fyi, this website covers the current shares of each Android version: http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-ve...
Title is incorrect, he's now the richest man in the world. (Forbes 2010 list)
> It is time for banks, who operate a public trust, to offer continuous (lagged) line item disclosure to enable crowdsourcing of risk analysis.

I read (probably in the Economist) that a regime like this is already in operation in New Zealand or Australia (if memory serves me right).
In my internship days, I had an employer who filed me as a contractor for tax purposes. It felt a bit sleazy, and I felt especially robbed when I later realized that I had to pay extra self-employment taxes. I really wish I had spoken up at the time.

There are cases of "independent contractor" abuse, and my case clearly violated almost every rule on this list.
Microsoft announces Windows Phone tool set
What could be done in this area to make you trust? EFF certification of some sort?
It could. Though the netting out only works when your counter-parties turn up to play their part.
I'm not sure that's a correlation that Google would want anyone to make.
What substantiative actions are being taken by the reserve? To me it appears they are gunning for inflation with the low rates.

If I have $billions then I can invest my money in a way that hedges against inflation. Conversely if I make $20k/year I can't insist that my employer pay me in a fixed number of long oil positions. So it's not true that inflation always hurts the bourgeoisie and helps the proletariat.

It is true that inflation hurts a lender and helps a debtor. If inflation is at 10% and your mortgage at 6% then you're effectively making a 4% return on debt. Conversely the bank is losing money because the money repaid is worth so much less than the money lent. Bonus points for anyone that figures out why the banks aren't lending

As for Bernanke/cronies motivations; the federal government would like inflation to be as high as possible without risking collapse. So if "money for their masters" was the Fed's goal they will keep gunning for sustainable inflation. Bernanke/cronies can hedge against it, and the largest debtor in the world would prefer to pay a low interest rate.
Neither is the fact that he's ripping off Robert Kiyosaki with his email (richdad...@)
Congratulations; we love and rely on Redis and are looking forward to the future.
I really like what Ubuntu has accomplished so far. Karmic and Lucid are really solid. I think they're also getting the design down with some of the recent announcements.

The problem here is this: Canonical doesn't control the hardware. Will ubuntu start matching up with OS X? Sure. It might already in some aspects. People don't buy Macs JUST for OS X. If that were the case, Pystar would have sold more than 700 systems. People want the entire package.

So, it's a purely windows vs ubuntu fight. Apple just makes for some nice headlines in an interview. Ubuntu needs to start getting people to produce machines with Ubuntu on it and make them ultra visible. One half assed attempt by Dell doesn't count.
I'm glad they don't blame you. But what bothered me so much about what you did was that you were the leader of that group. You'd recruited them as cofounders to apply to YC with. IIRC you were the CEO. So it was like an officer deserting his men, not just one of three guys dropping out of a three person startup.
Very cool idea - might have to try it out. Really love the graphics!
I enjoyed Rapid Development from Steve McConnell for giving me some vocabulary and back bone when I needed to manage up.
There is a lot you can do with the aggregate query data.

I do plan to eventually have accounts, i.e. opt-in features.

And as for results, I would suggest you try it for a week or so and see for yourself.
IIRC, in some countries census data is sometimes released with small, intentional errors to prevent the ability to locate specific individuals. Make a 36 year old sometimes a 37 year old or a 35 year old. Make a 180 cm person sometimes 182 cm or 178 cm. Small enough errors not to make the aggregate data invalid, but enough to make it hard to identify individuals from the data.

Perhaps this is a partial solution for the Netflix dataset.
Which is a ghastly future to contemplate.
Couldn't agree with you more. Developers want to learn new things. They also want to get kudos or recognition for their work, and make money. Hopefully we will over eliver on all of those fronts. Our business was built by supporting developers, and we look to carry forward all of the great things we have learned over the years for the new Windows Phone 7.

I will have more posts this week with code samples and other info as I pull it out of the dev team.
CBC News - British Columbia - Luger's family gets Olympic insurance funds
His taxonomy agrees nicely with the visual survey at http://blog.nahurst.com/visual-guide-to-nosql-systems (submitted yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1190772)
Flip the question around for a moment. Why aren't we all super paranoid about Google? Because we more or less believe that the way they use the information they collect isn't damaging to us. It doesn't mean we trust them completely, 100%, in every way, shape or form. It doesn't mean we don't use google's service with some degree of reservation that using their service is a bad idea even if they are telling the truth.

If I didn't have a basic level of trust with google I wouldn't use the service. I can apply that same basic level of trust with duckduckgo.

Once you apply that unbiased trust, you have two services: one that uses a variety of technology to protect the information they collect and one that doesn't collect information at all and takes steps to prevent others from doing the same.

Google might get bought out. Google might be subject to a sopoena. A google employee might steal something. Google might make a mistake. Any one of those things might prevent Google from fulfilling the basic promise of "we won't misuse your data." They won't ever have to lie or do anything evil. They might just make a mistake, and all your data will be there, vulnerable.
They did around 8 years ago, I don't know whether they still do. It's Denmark.
We've fought pretty hard over design details—we're all very passionate about design and perfectionistic when it comes to the user experience, and sometimes our aesthetics conflict. I don't anticipate any more serious fights, but I've read enough startup stories to know that such things are always possible. I'm not sure that what you're suggesting is right, though. Are you saying that a startup that's been torn asunder by internal conflict and reunited by the founders' convictions is stronger than one where work has proceeded smoothly and uneventfully?

And yes, I do have that drive to push through. It's not every day that you get the chance to change the world. I'm not throwing that away, no matter how difficult things might seem.

As to "soft and nice"—well, thanks! I get what you're saying, but my impression is that knowledge >> toughness in the startup world. Being tough is mainly about understanding that you have other options, that you don't have to accept everything that's put in front of your nose.
But even so, I don't understand why people (you're far from the only one) say this. For every dollar you save in taxes, you're paying two dollars to the bank. How can that possibly be smart?

That plan is to take the money you have invested in your personal dwelling, and leverage a government subsidized low-interest loan (mortgage with deductible interest) to re-invest for a higher return. Obviously it doesn't make sense for everyone - it requires that you have a low enough paper income that you aren't in AMT territory (and can thus deduct your interest) and that you are comfortable investing that money in something higher-return and presumably higher-risk, though the last few years have shown that your personal dwelling isn't necessarily a low-risk investment either.

The short answer is that for every two dollars you pay to the bank in interest, you should be making more than two dollars in return on your subsequent investment.
A broadband catapult for America
VMware: The Console: VMware hires key developer for Redis
I agree with most everything you say (open source is awesome, phones == next gen computers, and opt-in tinkering would be cool).

But that last point is what I'm worried about. Windows is opt-in now sorta, but it still gets malware. The Android appstore has already let financial related trojans into it.

So figuring out the balance is hard if you account for people willing to click "yes" to anything. I do in fact like the idea of an open system, but I want people to explain why I should also be required to be as defensive about my phone as I am with my Windows computer. (viruses, latest updates, dangerous applications).

Honestly, I'm not arguing that walled gardens are the best thing ever, I'm arguing that there are advantages that get ignored in the "OMG, it's my device" arguments. I want a nice middleground, and not another device that's totally open, and total a pain in the ass to manage and defend.
I prefer Google. The full link is in green, it's justified left, the results are wider and don't take as much vertical room. There's a cache too. What does DDG do better than Google? Does DDG have the crawling power of Google or does it pull in Google's results?
Well, I can say this: congrats on getting one of the best industrial data sets locked up. I hope you're proud of the work you did.

As for the possibility of netflix running a contest like this in an online fashion, well, maybe, but the benefits of having access to the data are enormous, plus you've now moved to a model where only the privileged few are allowed access via NDA, or Netflix has to provide computing resources to all researchers, etc. I don't see it happening.
I do not have any data regarding opt-in, but my impression was that as a rule, no one opts-in, and no one opts-out of basically anything (excepting the notorious cases, e.g., Real Player). If it worked, and somehow gave an at least somewhat unbiased sampling of the data, opt-in would obviously be best.

I am completely unsatisfied with the submit-and-run model. Feature engineering seems to rely on knowing your data really intimately, and that does not seem possible in a submit-and-run model.
The Meaning of Competition
Executables aren't scripts. Outlook is not open.

The problem Outlook had a few years ago was exactly the opposite. A completely closed system, set up with insecure settings by default. It would run the scripts inside an email when you viewed it, and did not require the user to click on anything. The idea was to make things easier for the user. How's that for ironic? :)
Have you tried using www.google.com?
Summing notional values is not an intelligent or accurate way to determine a firm's derivative exposure.

Please don't use the terms interchangeably.
That's a question you have to answer yourself. Right now, Duck Duck Go is the only search service I've ever heard of even trying to make that promise.

As an aside, there are a couple issues with companies and reputation. First is that a company might risk its reputation if the rewards are worth it. Second is that a company might care about its reputation but simply fail to hold true to it. Finally, a company might care about its reputation some of its employees might not.
Instead, you brushed off our claims, calling them “absolutely without merit,” among other things. It has taken negative publicity and an FTC investigation to stop things from getting worse. Some may make the argument that even if the privacy of some of your customers is violated, the benefit to mankind outweighs it, but the “greater good” argument is a very dangerous one. And so here we are.

In other words, "we showed them!" -- seem an awful lot like gloating to me.

It also doesn't appear that you ever seriously considered the "greater good" argument, beyond asserting that it's "dangerous." This leaves me with the suspicion that you chose to take the easy way out instead of weighting the actual costs and benefits of what you were doing.
In fact, it looks like the request was ultimately denied mainly on procedural grounds rather than on the merit of the request itself. Kinda frightening really.
BillforBill - How many $ have you wasted optimizing webdesigns for IE?
It's not only old phones. For example the yet to be release Sony-Ericsson X10 series of phones will ship with 1.6 with no word on whether it will ever be upgradeable to 2.x.
People don't buy Macs -just- because Apple owns the hardware, either. Their hardware isn't anything special, in fact (My wife, a die-hard MacGeek, hasn't owned a Mac that she hasn't had to bring into repair or gotten use out of her AppleCare in some way). Mac's have a perceived higher value, as well as top-notch support. This isn't to say that Apple itself has better support than PC repair. I much prefer Microbytes over the Apple Stores 'Genius' bar any day of the week, but Apple doesn't have the perceived "higher quality" in the shopping experience then HP, Dell, or others have.

Even if Canonical controlled the Hardware, they'd still have a long way to go before they reached the same experience that Apple provides from start to finish. I can buy an Apple product, and from the beginning to the end, I'm supported and assisted with almost every aspect of the mac in some manner, offline and online, even in person if I need it.

Edit: Added -just-
I can do all of this on Tumblr -- with the exception of finding people's quotes. Sell me on why that's the killer feature.
When multiple intelligent people work together, there will be fights over totally uneccessary things. With time, either the fights will get worse, or there will be some type of resolution where everyone realizes that the fights are hurting and compromises are reached to ensure that there are no more fights.

Some people get to that compromise point, but some can't. If the fights are resolved in a bad manner and resentment continues to brood, when money arrives and people get greedy, those fights will come back, and this time they will be worse.

So you have to get the fights over with at the start and everyone has to accept their position and their status. Then you can work in a focused fashion forward.

Changing the world is great, but I can likely do that by planting a bunch of trees in the amazon. Very few business get to change the world - most just get to make money. Would just making a lot of money also be enough for you, even if you don't get to change the world?
I suspect you might have a credibility problem as long as one of your quotes is attributed to 'Benjamin Franklin, President of the United States'.
Groupon founders launch $100M ‘Lightbank’ fund to seed Chicago startups
And a very good at that. Just his first post made me want to learn about android right away, even if I consider the iPhone a way superior experience.