skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, I have done startups in Silicon Valley for nearly three decades.

You have hit upon the core principle of using legal resources wisely, as needed, and with a practical focus. The flip side is that your lawyer needs to have a similar practical focus, which in practice typically translates into working with an experienced partner whose philosophy is consistent with your own (as you state in your piece).

I don't think I would add anything to your main theme (related themes would include try to get estimates for specific projects, or negotiate fixed fees for discrete projects for which this makes sense; monitor how projects are staffed so as not to incur significant double-billing; don't let green lawyers get themselves educated at your company's expense, etc. - but these are all really just a part of what works itself out routinely and easily if you once have a solid working relationship with a trusted partner and are thus subsumed under your broad theme, which you nicely articulated).
I was looking for dedicated server hosting the other day, and that market is just ridiculously full of bad, stupid reviews.

"This dedicated server provider is terrible! They wouldn't even help me with a mysql problem" etc.

I'm sure half the hosting co reviews are done by competitors, and the other half are done by idiots who don't understand anything. And of course all the satisfied customers can't be bothered to write reviews.

It's always going to be best to get a personal recommendation than trusting reviews on the internet, for anything.
Where did it all start anyway
Since the YC dead filter does not give the poster any indication they have been killed they cannot even ask the community.

I have had showdead on for a while, and noticed a few other such users as well.
Quod erat demonstrandum’d
I didn't quite get it until watching a bit of the video.
Might be nicer if on the main page you had a 'we turned this image into these images'. kind of thing.
It looks like it could be an image library, rather than a product which creates images.
You mean they didn't find a way to make money when they drowned out the content with all the other ads?

I wonder how long they'll continue pulling traffic, the community aspect of the site looks a lot like it's in its death throes.
I've actually pulled out that comic twice in the last few months -- one time was last week doing a code review of a custom CMS. The progression on the developers' faces was something along the lines of: confusion (why are we looking at a web comic?); amusement (that's pretty funny); horror (our code has SQL injection problems!).
I know that in England at least Newspapers have to clearly distinguish content from adverts.

Doesn't this completely violate this principle?

On a side note, I've also always though Google's sponsored links were also pretty shady in that they barely distinguish themselves from actual search results (very slight colour difference, 'sponsored results' tag hidden in top right).

Just makes me wonder if this is actually a viable business model or will turn out to be something that legislators slap down in the next few years to level the playing field.
Amazing, great organization.
IV wouldn't say whether it sold or simply loaned the patent to Verizon for its TiVo fight.

You could rent a patent just long enough to clobber your competition?! The sheer diabolical genius makes my head hurt. Its like netflix, but for trolls.
I'm not sure there's room for a lot of competition for end users in a service like Yelp. "Review accuracy" isn't a metric that users are capable of measuring with any effectiveness - it's so subjective anyway. The only thing that will put one service above another is how many businesses have been reviewed, and Yelp has a huge head start there.
Specifically, for Ron Conway, we look at 2004 and onwards.
So, tell me.  Have you ever worked with any design patterns?
The Online Private Sale Trend Packs Its Bags
Your notion of 'type-correctness' seems fairly static and you don't know Common Lisp either. A type hint in Common Lisp is the same as a type declaration. Common Lisp just let's you declare the types optionally.

If you declare a type for a value and then try to store a value of an incorrect type then SBCL(and many other CL compilers) will respond with a compiliation error(not a warning) :

; in: LAMBDA NIL
; (TYPE (SINGLE-FLOAT NODE))
;
; caught ERROR:
; Bound is not *, a SINGLE-FLOAT or a list of a SINGLE-FLOAT: NODE
;
; compilation unit finished
; caught 1 ERROR condition

debugger invoked on a SB-INT:COMPILED-PROGRAM-ERROR in thread #<THREAD "initial thread" RUNNING {1002A5A051}>:
Execution of a form compiled with errors.
Form:
#'(NAMED-LAMBDA TRAVERSE-PRE-ORDER (NODE FUN)
(DECLARE (TYPE (SINGLE-FLOAT NODE))
(IF NODE
(PROGN
(APPLY FUN (LIST NODE))
(IF (BTNODE-LEFT NODE)
(TRAVERSE-PRE-ORDER (BTNODE-LEFT NODE) FUN))
(IF (BTNODE-RIGHT NODE)
(TRAVERSE-PRE-ORDER (BTNODE-RIGHT NODE) FUN)))))
(BLOCK TRAVERSE-PRE-ORDER))
Compile-time error:
Bound is not *, a SINGLE-FLOAT or a list of a SINGLE-FLOAT: NODE

Type HELP for debugger help, or (SB-EXT:QUIT) to exit from SBCL.

restarts (invokable by number or by possibly-abbreviated name):
0: [CONTINUE] Ignore runtime option --load "tree-traversal.lisp".
1: [ABORT ] Skip rest of --eval and --load options.
2: Skip to toplevel READ/EVAL/PRINT loop.
3: [QUIT ] Quit SBCL (calling #'QUIT, killing the process).

((LAMBDA ()))
What I'm saying is that review sites are misleading even when reviews aren't being paid for. Paying people to write reviews makes the data no worse than it already was, because it was already pretty bad.
US rice undercuts Haitian farmers (again)
It's used for attacks.

In the context of a stored XSS attack^ it is used to avoid signature based detection. Think about malicious Javascript as a virus. Current virus scanners search for signatures within programs^^ to determine whether a program is a virus or not. Signatures are unique strings^^^ that identify a program. If you can encode your virus as a bunch of symbols, you can avoid detection by automated scanners. Then, once a user loads the page, the decoder function gets called and the malicious Javascript gets executed.

Of course, a signature could be generated for the decoder function. As is common in many areas of the security industry, signature based detection is an arms race. Obstrufication is one method the attackers use.

In the context of a reflected XSS^^^^ obstrufication simply makes it less obvious there is an embedded script.

-

^ Javascript permanently stored on the vulnerable host's server.

^^ They also use other methods too, but signature based detection has been the primary method used by anti-virus since the industry started.

^^^ In practice they are not unique.

^^^^ Javascript embedded in a link to a site. User clicks on link and Javascript gets executed in the context of the vulnerable host.
what if you had reviews made by your friends and sources you trust accessible to you online that seems like a better model than see what everyone and their dog thinks about everything under the sun..
Why did you feel it was necessary to get a person to sign-up to view anything before the main page?
I don't get a chance to check it out before signing up, so I didn't really get to experience what you built.

Look at pinkbike, mtbr, roadbikereview, etc. I can do a ton of stuff before I have to register, and that is what allowed them to grow.
Yes, but it will ultimately be one factor of many. More important is yet more experience, connections, and being able to do what the employer needs you to do in a timely fashion.

So use what you created and try and get quoted about it, make as many connections as you can, and get some more professional portfolio items. This will, however, be a great thing to bring up in an interview when they talk about challenging or interesting applications you've built.
Why not regulate the voltage with software?
Captain Obvious here again. Doesn't all this go away if you use Javascript to inject untrusted text directly into the DOM rather than rendering it as HTML which is then interpreted by the browser?

And if so, it seems to me that there's a fairly obvious way to build that directly into templating engines and meta-languages like HAML.
Absolutely. I just added a title that updates with the stories. I've also added a (ugly) favicon so it's easy to distinguish from other tabs. Thanks for the suggestion.
How to Feed the World: Monsanto vs. Michael Pollan
Is the iPad worth the time for mobile app developers?
Thanks, this will be a huge help to my business!
-A Somali pirate
On an unrelated note, you should consider using only one JS library on your website (260KB of JS on the home page seems excessive), decreasing the size of the larger JPGs on the main page, and minifying your CSS. There's no reason a production website should have a table of contents in its stylesheets.
Peter Shankman / HARO Just Sent Me a Cease-and-Desist Letter. What Now?
Remember, "100% Recycled" is Just a Start
but that's not what's happening - they're not paying people to write reviews, they're (allegedly) collecting money for removing unfavorable reviews. i think that's more damaging.
Here's a shot.

Economic growth is mostly based on big factors but those are often controlled or influenced by a strikingly small number of people (like Henry Ford, William Shockley, Fred Terman, Carnegie, Sears, Rockefeller, Mittal, Napoleon, Franklin, Eli Lilly, etc). When it's winner-take-all (or -most), the country/city/state that hosts the winner benefits greatly. So stacking your odds to grow or attract these pivotal individuals is a valid economic strategy.

Even if you presume that low skilled immigrants are a drain on the economy (I think that's up for debate), how many would you trade to make sure that Elon Musk lived in your country? How about the Brin Family? etc, etc, etc. Smart, driven people around the world want to come to America to live, work, and build companies because it's where they think they have the best chance of success. Losing even a handful of them could cause America to lose the fight for the next great industry, especially since China, India, and the EU are much more prosperous than they were for much of America's 20th century boom.

I don't think the Startup Visa is enough, but I think it's a concrete, feasible place to start.
(ot) any particular reason the title of this was changed?
It was a pun on a pejorative use of the word - if you disagree, look up "pejorative".

At the risk of seeming "PC" to oversensitive folks, using social identities as pejoratives is inherently insulting; you're associating their racial/sexual/etc. identity with something undesirable, even if you don't think of it as a slur. "Gay" to mean stupid or annoying is of a piece with terms like "gyp", "indian-giver", or "nigger-rig".
The Making of The Man Your Man Could Smell Like
I just think the investors have more to gain. An individual foreign entrepreneur doesn't have the means to lobby the US gov't, and domestic entrepreneurs don't have this problem. Investors might benefit dozens or hundreds of times from this effort.
It's pretty easy to work out where fusion is going to happen, since it happens compositionally. You compose fusible functions, and the (.) between them is syntactically where fusion occurs. GHC will tell you how many fusion sites were found.
Hmmm... Read the top voted comment on this recent Hacker News post.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1137337

I'm not sure why everyone thinks Microsoft is a changed company. They still have 90% desktop market share. I guess everyone is too busy discussing the Google "monopoly" with 70% search.

Microsoft is, of course, doing what's in their best interest, as should all companies. They aren't running a charity and they are obligated by law to serve their stockholders. However, it really is bad for consumers when there is not enough competition.
your original title was editorializing. it's not cool for the submitter to decide how people should feel about an article.
If you find this interesting, you might want to check out the Topic 7 lecture notes from Bryan Pardo's Machine Perception of Music and Audio course at Northwestern University: http://music.cs.northwestern.edu/courses/eecs352/lectures.ph...

Those notes show an example of a spiral pitch representation and discuss chromagrams (mapping complex wave forms to pitch classes) as well as other concepts.

For a deeper look, check out the book Signals Sound and Sensation by William M. Hartmann.
Twitter's Ad Plan Revealed: Search Results + API
to be fair AOL,MySpace, and yahoo social stuff has looked that way for years. idiots don't know any better. and idiots is a huge demographic.
This is just AIS Live. AIS (Automtic Identification System), or UAIS (Universal AIS) is now required by law on all vessels over 5000 tonnes. The original idea was to help prevent collision at sea under the SOLAS (Safety of Life at Sea) convention. It uses self-organised time-domain multiplexing to broadcast GPS Lat/Long (usually WGS84) and current SOG (Speed over Ground) and COG (Course over Ground), augmented by heading, cargo, port of departure, next port of call, and waypoint information.

It also broadcasts the ship name, registration number, physical size, tonnage, loading and other information.

Interestingly, although it's required by law that it be carried, it is not required by law that it be turned on.

Note, the above is all from memory, and some may be a little out-of-date or inaccurate. It's close enough to give you the idea, and if you want more accuracy it's easy to look up.
Parallels cuts virtualization down to the bare metal on Xserve
You have no reason to think you're OK for clicking the link. Dazzlingly stupid things like this have happened to people before.
Immigration is such a tough issue, especially in a recession. But I love the idea of the US being a magnet for the best and the brightest that start companies. Many countries use qualifying criteria such as education level or willingness to start a business as a way to gain permanent entry. We could do worse than to adopt such policies here.
You could also use this approach for things like deciding how frequently to sync email/text messages, how often to retry connecting to a tower in an area with low reception, how bright to make the screen, how often to run garbage collection.
The one by DePaul is a block away from our office.
FUIs (fake user interfaces) are bad business.

Even magazines have the decency to print "Special Advertising Section" at the top of their faux articles.
A designer friend and I will likely play with a redesign of some mutual friends' university club's website.

EDIT: And then I notice that this was posted yesterday. :)
I prefer "unwashed masses" to "idiots". Definitely a huge demographic though!
Unfortunately, server hardening, firewalls, and patching wouldn't have prevented this problem; it's buried in the actual application code.
Don’t forget to fflush, don’t forget to fflush
True. Throughout the blog post and comments here, I never mentioned that I am not in favor of software patents, but I absolutely agree. That said, there is usually some way to weasel out of the shadow of a patent, and being sued for a smaller outrageous amount isn't as useful as not being sued at all.
It seems that you have a beef with a particular(or multiple) Common Lisp libraries. Fair enough.

However, I never said that you should write every line of code in your app from scratch. I did say that you should OWN the decisions for YOUR app.
I believe that this more accurately describes the attitude of the CL community (and that of many other languages too).

My point was that meta-programming is more powerful in Lisp than Haskell(as far as I'm aware). That's pretty much it.
Yes. Metasploit is a delivery vehicle for known exploits, principally for non-web applications. It's not designed to find new web vulnerabilities.

WebInspect is a web application scanner. It includes a not-very-useful database of known application vulnerabilities, but also has a well-regarded fuzzer that generates random scary inputs to every input it finds on a site that it spiders. That's what Raf is talking about (his job is, in part, to promote that very expensive tool).

You don't want WebInspect, or AppScan, or any other scanner. If you're a professional, you want Burp Suite, which costs something like EU120 and does just as good a job as a fuzzer as WebInspect. If you're a hobbyist, you want OWASP WebScarab, which is free. Both are Java apps, and will run anywhere Java does.
Maybe next year
Picurio (YC W09) unveils camera-in-browser for Mac/Safari
In case you think your posts were for naught, know that the argument annoyed me enough that I gave $100 to The Climate Project.

It seemed a more worthwhile use of my resources than posting another comment that would have agreed with yours.
I'm finding it hard to reconcile these rules with comparative advantage, but maybe "delegating" refers only to subordinates and not to divvying among cofounders, which is what I'm thinking of. (Also, your "willing doesn't mean that it's smart for you to be the one doing it" note somewhat addresses this.)
I love Ubuntu, particularly the package management, but the magical stuff they do in packages is extremely frustrating.

The base PHP module includes suhosin, while there's also a suhosin module which just places the configuration file, that should be there by default.

Suhosin can cause apps to run amock if you're dealing with large arrays or big posts. It's a nice to have feature, but it's also a feature that needs to be disclosed to a developer before trying to develop against it.

Anything that modifies the behavior of the base language needs to be explicitly called out when the package is installed.
Online Identity Calculator
Can you get a compilation error for

(defun foo (x)
(car x))

because x is not known to be a list? I've never seen a lisp do that, though at times I wanted it.
You should probably make some restrictions, as this model assumes you can sell additional products at little/no cost to yourself. What if somebody contracts you for a $20.000 project and whips up a 25% discount card?
Quick question: can I get in trouble for posting the actual letter online? I'd like to get more people's thoughts on it.
I'm shocked, shocked!
Did you read the blog post?
yet to be signed, just passed by the house
The criteria here is raising money. How is that better?
How about ask someone in the neighborhood.

I've had good experiences going to new area and asking locals where I should eat. People take a lot of pride in their neighborhoods and are more than happy to help.
What Is Time? One Physicist Hunts for the Ultimate Theory
Tim Bray resigns from Oracle/Sun
"The client has agreed the ship date; I'll need your estimates by next week."
E-prescriptions more reliable than handwritten ones
After TARP passed in the midst of one of the largest protests of a congressional action that I've witnessed in my life is anyone surprised? The Congress care about increasing the power of the government and doing whatever it is they want to do when they're in power. They like the new powers when they are in power and criticize them when they are out of power. Though the Neocons just criticize how much they are used rather than their existence so I guess they're more consistent.

I wonder when the small government conservatives will leave the Republican party and when the anti-war, pro civil liberties liberals will leave the Democratic party?

I think Barack Obama did a masterful job of pacifying the anti-war left by annoying his intention to withdraw from Iraq after a certain period of time. I don't know that it will actually happen but it was a pretty smart move to get it off of people's minds for the most part.

We don't have a two party system but we have a bi-factional ruling coalition. I wonder how long it will be before more people realize this.
Despite what you might think, Democrats and Republicans both want a powerful federal government. The Democrats want a powerful government where citizens have the right to give the government a lot of money for social programs, and the Republicans want a powerful government where the citizens have the right to give the government a lot of money for wars. Pretty much the same.
Alex Gaynor's PyCon Roundup - Days 0 and 1
'Freedom' chair: Part desk chair, part mountain bike
Indeed. And you either do that in Stored Procedures using parameters that you've passed in (without manipulating them as strings), or you construct your parameterized query on the webserver with the joins and sorts that you need, and then pass it to the database along with the parameters it needs to stick in.

Like I said. It's a solved problem, and has been so for a dozen years now.
Recommendation algorithm wants to show you something new
Can the title of this be changed to something more clear? When I first read it, I thought it was talking about how the trend to sell businesses online (online private sale) - the way Kiko was sold on ebay - is no longer popular ('packing its bags')

EDIT: yes I know the NYTimes has that title. Doesn't mean it's clear.
(defun foo (x)
(declare (type list x))
(car x))
I think there are 2 kinds of engineers out there. Those who simply like solving technical problems and innovating to earn a living, and those who themselves are entrepreneurs deep down to some degree.

Group 1:
The first group is not the target of this discussion, because they're more interested in being employed and having a steady income -- they'll work for you if you have an interesting problem to solve and you pay them market rate for their skills. And companies should value their risk aversion, because it's good to balance insane entrepreneurs with realistic detail-conscious normal people.

Group 2:
I've been in the second group, and now am in a founder's position bootstrapping a company with my own piggy bank. I have no problem with the way things are. I've worked not only for low pay to do something that was interesting, but also for free to learn the ropes or have a chance at gaining experience at something new. There are very few opportunities to do that in the big corporate world -- especially to have a chance, based much more uniquely on who you are and what you want, to do something very different from your career past or something for which you have little experience. This is especially true if you don't have a stellar academic history, which most of us know means nothing but which the corporate and academic world value so much it prevents group 2 engineers from getting into a lot of doors. And there are other benefits. New ideas come along the way when you're concentrating in the fast-paced smalltech world, along with new friends and knowledge that come in handy regardless if you decide to ever found or be an early executive team member of a company. It's not just about the net monetary gain between today and exit.

As an engineer with an entrepreneurial core, I definitely don't despise those who happen to have greater persuasive skills and use those skills to build a productive workforce that's less expensive and adds more value than the next guy. Isn't that one of the reasons they're successful? And isn't it one of the reasons an investor is more likely to give that entrepreneur capital to grow a business? If that guy can convince me to work for his company for less overall monetary gain between now and when I leave his company than if I had gone for some other option (in a wildly imaginative world where engineers have lots of options every time they look for work), then who am I to be upset later over what's in the bank? If he was a better salesman than the next guy (or an i-bank, or Google, or your dad's friend's tire company who needs a web dev), I'm happy to be aboard as the collateral benefits will be great. In addition, if I'm worth something more than the next guy, being a group 2 entrepreneur-engineer, I take it as a test of my own maturity in the entrepreneurial world to bargain for and be able to convince others of what I'm actually worth to them.

QUESTION: What about profit sharing instead of equity? I've always wondered if this an option explored by any software startups.