skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Right which is why a policy of giving a range with the maximum amount to fix it is a better policy. It takes five minutes to take a look at a machine and say oh man that looks like it could be anywhere from $400 to 2K (replace every part).
Ideas mean absolutely nothing. For every idea that someone comes up with I can find you 5 other guys that had thought about the same idea a while back. Its the people who can execute the idea that YC chooses to invest. Most of the YC startup founders have done some work in the past and they have show that they are resourceful and that they can execute. So don't read too much into the idea thing.
If I remember it right, investing a million will get you a Green Card. Not quite sure if investor money counts though.

But basically, an H1B visa ties you to your employment so working on your own startup on that visa is not allowed.

The Startup Visa could help you though but it's only a bill right now.
Killer post - I think this message really needs to reach the abundance of business students today. It's tough as nails to get something non-technical when you're fresh out of college and want to work in a startup. Everyone, often even the founder, is an engineer. You can teach an engineer business, but you can't teach a businessman engineering.
It's not so much that you're cynical as that you haven't thought about where the descriptions of these startups came from. They came from an event where startups presented to investors in SV. So of course the descriptions sound like they'd be appealing to that audience; that's what they were trying to do.
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It's funny that it comes off as a joke since I really do love it. I mean, it powers http://nyhtp.com. I've had nothing but great experience with Redis, mixed experience with tokyo cabinet and tyrant, and not enough real work experience with Mongo.
The Chad Etzel that was with Twitter (part time, I think)?
There is no competition between embedly and embedster. One is a delivery network the other helps you generate revenue from the videos on your site. If anything we complement each other. (founder of embedly)
I recall reading recently (perhaps last week) that the rules had been clarified recently so that you could not get a H1B visa sponsored by a company of which were a major shareholder.

If its an option, you could ask your company super nicely to keep you on board, and just stop paying you. I doubt this will work, but it might be worth a shot.
Ask HN: How do you stay on top of legal work and/or taxes?
I recently received a letter from the State of Utah detailing an owed debt of 3k dollars - 2500 dollars in taxes and 500 in fees/penalties. We formed an LLC entity in late July of last year and have not made any revenue yet. I don't know where I went wrong but I also don't have a great deal of time to look into all the possibilities.

Because of this, I've debated hiring an accountant or paying for a pre-paid legal service to help me overcome these types of problems (of ignorance). What are you thoughts here? Should I just stop what I'm doing and spend a week or two learning as much as I can about the legal processes in which my company is bound or should I pay to have someone walk me through it? What are you doing yourself?
You should ask your question over at http://answers.onstartups.com/.
I use radio static to fall asleep; it has the same effect on me as those binatural beats. I focus on trying to conjure up an image out of that noise (a waterfall or a rainstorm is often what I get) and that consequently drowns out my thoughts until I just pass out.
It's a great piece of software for writing. I've tried Scrivener and like it but the interface minimalism of Ulysses jives with me. The organizational tools are particularly well thought out.

My main criticisms:

* updates come far too infrequently.
* little support for multiple versions of a document.
What industry are you in and how do you get most of your resumes? Might have something to do with it.
RE NewsLabs: That is exactly what we're trying to do. Also, that's exactly how many of our journalists feel.
5 minutes? It probably takes 10x that just to get it into the hands of someone who can make that assessment.
Yeah, I actually pitched the exact same thing to PG a year ago (in interviews) and YC thought no one needed search beyond e-mail. Then again I hear Greplin was accepted to YC with a completely different pitch :)
I was expecting "Answerly" similar to stackexchange but from a cursory look, it just seems a search engine. I think some integration of stackexchange like features might be useful.
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What you and your cofounder is doing now (working part time on your web-app) is probably already illegal while on your H1B, even if you're not getting paid. If you have incorporated in some form or another it's definitely illegal. Be very, very careful.

Your best (only?) option to have your own company sponsor you is an O1 visa.
You should read the article you linked. Its actually a very good discussion of the subject.

Technically, you are correct - there is a such thing as a legal unpaid internship, according to some interpretations of the law. This would be when the student gets more out of it than the business.

However, most unpaid internships, such as the one WePay discussed in its last post, are clearly illegal.
I imagine that this has something to do with RFS 3: http://ycombinator.com/rfs3.html ("Things Built On Twitter")
re Zencoder: thanks for the mostly kind words. We've run a lot of numbers of a few hundred thousand files on representative websites, and we chose that pricing model because it was (1) pretty competitive relative to other options, and (2) it aligns incentives with our customers well.

But we'd love your input, so if you don't mind, I just shot you an email.
people matter more. good people know how to fail bad ideas quickly and come up with better ones. good people > good ideas.
"Change the rules and people will behave accordingly"

Very true. Do you know of any provisions (loopholes) for determining which organization actually employs the workers? Where do employees end and contractors begin? Couldn't organizations exist that simply contact out <50 employees to companies?

Lets say I run a manufacturing business that requires 70 people to operate at target capacity. Couldn't I employ 35 workers, and then contract out the other 35 employees to a separate company (also owned by me, or maybe contracted through a staffing firm), so that each organization stays under the 50 employee limit?
MongoDB + Redis are proving a winning combination for me so far. Or, rather, the combination of having a fast key/value store with ephemeral key support and a document database is a winner. It gives you two levels and more immediate optimization and separate of concerns opportunities.
I'm not trying to give you guys a hard time. I'm glad you're doing well, and are paying your interns now.

However, you're still advising people to break the law on your blog. Its a weird, perhaps antiquated, and largely unknown law - but it was pointed out to you on HN last week and you're clearly aware of it. Thus, IMHO, its irresponsible of you to continue to encourage unpaid internships on your blog.
Two key lessons I learned:

1) Have a structure from the beginning. Know where the story is going and the key milestones for each character on the way. Be open to changing this, but the key to a great fiction story is the ending not the beginning.

2) Work out commitments. When I wrote http://www.scribd.com/The-Cookie-From-the-Cookie-Jar-2008/d/... I committed to sending my friends (and, ultimately, others) 3 chapters every week for six months, and that it would be finished by election day (Nov 2004). That got me over the line. The lack of commitment since then is why it's still sitting in my drawer awaiting the re-write.
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You can teach an engineer business, but you can't teach a businessman engineering.

I know what you're trying to say here, but it sounds slightly condescending to me. First, I firmly believe that picking up "business" isn't as easy as many make it out to be. Second, if a given businessman had chosen to pursue engineering I'm sure--all other considerations being equal--they would do just fine.

These are two distinct disciplines that require two distinct ways of thinking. Until you acknowledge this fact I really don't think you can successfully make either a secondary skill set.
I have coffee that needs fetching. Perhaps you can do that. ;)
Do you seriously think those are at all similar?
In the past I've just sent a link to my resume and looked at my access logs. This has worked for me, but the printed results are often cringe worthy.
Ask HN: Speed up HTTP Post, desktop app
I want to speed this up.
I was playing around doing HTTP post, using normal desktop app, in C#.
All I am trying to do is send a few lines of code (200-500 LOC) using HTTP post, to my server, where I have a server side PHP code, that uses this code, generates some result and sends it back.

The results again are just some <100 LOC.

Now, the time taken varies A LOT.
It goes from anywhere between 2 seconds, to 30 seconds and sometimes the message is just simply LOST.

I know this because, I do have a timer that calculates the time taken as well.

Now, I think this should be pretty simple to solve, right?
Except, I am finding it hard to find...
And I am new to doing HTTP like this, outside a browser....

Now that raises questions, if the only reason this is happening is that I am using HTTP ffrom C# inside a desktop app, instead of a browser seems absurd to me, but I keep thinking along those lines...

Oh, FYI, this is pretty similar to what I am doing....

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/debx8sh9.aspx

Check out the C# one.

Except, "postData" in my case is autogenerated by some other code, and is usually anywhere between 200-500 LOC approx. and the "response" is my results, which is some 100 KLOC.

This reminds me, how do I make the above link display as a link, when I submit questions, or respond to something in HN ??

I think the above link should be showing as a simple text....
1985:
we make personal computers.
2010:
we make social applications.

get on the train or get off it. social, realtime, location etc. are the new technologies of this generation.
> What does your advanced degree tell employers about your ability and motivation to solve their problems?

For many years that was the point of a degree. It didn't really matter the subject of degree to get a job; people with degrees were seen as more motivated and better problem solvers. And it was probably true: getting a degree was hard, expensive, and very few people did it. It selected you out as someone worth employing.

Of course, because that's true more and more people started to go to school to get degrees. In fact, programs were created so many people could get degrees as possible. High schools dropped shop classes and focused on getting every student into higher education. Higher education itself got a little easier to accommodate these students. The result is that now a large portion of the population go to college and university but the selective nature of higher education no longer exists. It's still being sold to students exactly the same way but the benefit for employers is gone.
I try my best to(and think I do pretty well to some degree) practise this very idea. I am a recent non-technical grad and have been trying my best to add value to a start-up I reached out to. The one thing that I have found to be my best attribute is owning a project I know I can do well. I present an idea, say how I will accomplish it, and execute. The thing I am battling at the moment is spending more time planning than executing. I spoke with a knowledgable friend once and he mentioned, especially in the start-up arena, that once you reach the point where you are 70% confident that an idea is a good one, you should execute right then. The energy and time involved in working on the remaining 30% confidence is simply too expensive for a start-up to afford. I now just need to take this to heart and practise it.
i knew a lot of folks in engineering school who couldn't hack it and went one building over to business.
never met anyone who made the opposite move, for any reason.

maybe they all liked the b-school's swanky decor.
I can't help feel you're responding to individual bits of my reply rather than the whole thing. As for the rational basis of such rules, I invite you to consider why the securities act of 1933 was created in the first place, and the circumstances which led up to that.
or 60/1.
At best, this is a "gray area". It sounds like you and I had different conclusions from the same source. What I took away from it is that the statute on the books has this hard-to-interpret notion of benefit to the employer, that is often interpreted to mean more benefit than cost. More importantly, what I got from the article was an explanation and examples of the lack of enforcement against those offering unpaid internships -- regardless of the legislation. Only from the enforcement of the law can we really know what the law is.

So, A) you were technically wrong and B) you are still wrong in practice.

As a decision maker, I need information about threats and opportunities. As a tinkerer, I like knowing minutiae. My response both indicated the functional value of unpaid internships as not a legal threat and provided a link to a reasonable discussion of the technicalities.

Your statement "You should read the article you linked" doesn't add to the conversation, except as an attack at me. Even if you did not intend it as such, in this circumstance you are suggesting that I did not do my homework (when in fact I was helping observers of our interchange by providing sources.) While I thank you for leading me down the path of exploring this legal oddity, I'd rather you left out aspersions.
Ok so after I decided that it was interesting and cool, my first thought was, "What's the emacs-mode for Ulysses?". I couldn't find one so it looks like I may have to actually download and install it. Anyone know of similar emacs or vim modes for writing?
yes you can work for something, as long at you are not employed.

eg. you can work to jump start a startup, and get equity for it, or even be a founder and own a chunk of it, but you are not allowed to be a 'employee' of that startup.

You really have to get the advice a good lawyer for this. Not one of those big firm shops though. There are many good lawyers around SV, that are in small firms/own practice. You probably will get better advice from them..
this post is dead on. i was approached by an undergrad at the university of maryland last weekend, and i was instantly amazed by his initiative. this guy said "i want to help you with your project!" a bit skeptic at first, i gave him git access and we decided to have a phone call the next day where i would describe the code base.

that night, before the phone call, i logged into github and saw him committing code. i was blown away that he was diving into the code without having been told what to do. and better yet, he had no prior experience in php. he was a python and ruby kind of guy. my reaction was: wow, this guy is definitely on that list of 2 or 3 people who i think of when i decide to start my next company. by the way, those 2 features were added in 2 days on hndir.com, and the post i wrote about it attracted 2k visitors (and something like 100 new hackers joined the site).

this guy was technical, but he didn't know php. if you're non-technical, i'd say be willing to learn and use whatever you need to help (maybe not a language). this is how the technical guys get started. they just figure it out as they go.
You know nothing more about most of these startups than a few sentences written for investors. That you dismiss them so summarily and so nastily says more about you than them.

Why don't you just wait and see how they do?
How about this:

Business isn't easy. But it's learned through experience. A bright engineer with a few years of business experience is going to run rings around a B-school graduate with no practical experience.
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You seem to know writing tools, so: if I already have a composition interface I prefer—OmmWriter, in my case—what would be a good pure outliner/information manager to act as a complement to it?

Preferably not a data silo; I push all my actual writing to Github with each revision, so a plaintext format that could come along for the ride and wouldn't require a special viewer would be nice.
I'm a student, and to be honest I don't mind if I don't get paid. In my mind, at least - it's a fair trade: I get to work for experience, and I get to see - up close - what a startup's really like. That sure beats working as a bellboy or a cashier or a tutor somewhere, where you get money but not a whole lot of useful experience.

I suspect that the article above isn't an argument for employers to hire unpaid interns. It's rather an argument for non-technical entrepreneur-to-bes to approach the internship job with an attitude of 'you don't want to hire me? That's fine. I'll stick around and help you out until you do. And if you don't - that's still fine. I'll just learn all I can and then disappear after I'm no longer needed.'

Still a fair trade, IMO.
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I do my best to be a good citizen and am a big proponent of workers' rights. Law is not sacred. Especially unenforced law that inadequately accounts for the realities of modernity. Personal responsibility does not oblige the individual to refrain from partaking in a socially-lauded tradition.
It happens on Brazil as well. It's common for people to take six-months courses to review all high-school contents before taking the entrance exam, and it's also common for them to fail at least once.

Depending on the college and graduation you want, you might be competing with other 15, 20 people for that spot.

But that happens mostly on the public colleges, that not only are free, but considered much better than the private ones. And then we get a cross: rich people can pay for the courses and go to the (free and better) public colleges, while poor people must join a (paid and worse) private college.

It's quite messed up.
A much bigger nit that gave it away for me in the very first paragraph is that 13th century is far too early for complex numbers and Cartesian representation.
That would indeed be tough, considering there are only 48 games in the first 2 rounds.
I would suggest you to ask the question at a programming forum/QnA site like Stack Overflow - http://stackoverflow.com
use this almost everyday at work.
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Ouch. If fnid2 is mistaken isn't it more likely because he has much less information about these startups and their founders than you or the attendees of demo day?
People still go directly to the manufacturer for repairs many times when there are licensed repair shops elsewhere. People can be less trusting of independent repair shops because there is a view that they will rip you off/nickel and dime you to death (i.e. you go into a mechanic for one thing and he gives you a 'laundry list' of other things that he wants you to pay him to fix).
I don't think we disagree. Mind bearing with me for a moment?

Probability of A (round 1 / selecting the right urn):

1 / 2^32 (32 games, 2 possible winners for each)

Probability of B (round 2:

1 / 4^16 (16 games, 4 possible winners for each)

Probability of A and B:

(1 / 2^32) * (1 / 4^16)

So it would appear the chain rule for probability agrees with my point. What am I missing?
really looking forward to this. Offline reading will be great on the train ride to work. thanks for making my life easier.
No, because PUT is defined as something entirely different — multiple identical PUT requests on the same resource at different times should always transfer the same state and have the same response.

PUT is also defined such that the body contains the whole resource, ideally in a Content-Encoding that you can GET with an appropriate Accept header.
A lot of features seem to overlap with org-mode.
Reliability and robustness are features of ThinkPads, not basic laptop functionality. With the ThinkPad, a good chunk of the 2.5k goes towards making it a solid product. With the apple, a good chunk goes towards making sure it's pretty and a trendy product. Simple as that.
You're calling a Python and Ruby programmer "non-technical" because he doesn't know PHP?

I didn't know the technical-skills predicate had its result inverted since I last checked it out ;-)

Kudos on reaching out to others, though. Can't recommend delegation enough, and I say that as someone who painted himself into a corner by hoarding work.
Alright, well can we at least agree that you should disclose when you knowingly give advice that violates US law?

Surely you can see how this could cause problems for someone else who has the bad fortune of taking your advice at face value.
I was in a similar situation. H1B with a big company, left to start a company with an American co-founder who applied for the H1 transfer (which isn't subject to a cap).

Email me and I can hopefully give you some insight. Email address is on my site.
i was admiring his initiative as a coder. the takeaway was to have the initiative to tell startups what you can help them with, as opposed to having the attitude of "tell me what i can do." (this person specifically offered to build these two features, and did so without much guidance at all)
Anyone know of a way to get a textmate theme into vim easily?
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