skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I always have known what my programs did and what they were going to be used for so I find it difficult that these programmer did not. So if your Boss tells you to program something illegal you would have no problem doing so. I would say, OK that's fine but before we start lets discuss this with your Boss, the three of us first. The judge gets to decide on the M. programmers.
My definition is merely a company that is 'starting up'. It doesn't matter if it has created its own market via innovation or entered a mature market, I consider all new companies startups.

All companies exist in volatile markets regardless of whether its a mature (many competitors) or new market (must generate demand for product). They all need to differentiate themselves from their competitors in some way in order to be successful, so all companies will have to innovate some aspect of their business.
The Rails source code?
Why Everything Is Becoming a Game
The $100 mentioned is the minimum cost to get an ad on Google TV, not what Slate spent (though that doesn't mean the $1300 doesn't include the cost of the ad).
yes, you can learn to increase your executive function. less wrong has had a few excellent threads on the subject, search for the tag "akrasia".

edit: actually, see Cayenne's post.
This advice is written from the perspective that writing is 100% of the project. Writing is 10% of the project. Writing a salesletter, a marketing site, linkbaits, and obsessive promotion is the other 90% of the project. That is time debt that I take on as soon as I sit down and say "OK, I'm going be become an author."

The upside to it is miniscule: I know I can sell thousands of copies of software for $30, because I've done it, and am reasonably certain that I could sell accounts at a new SAAS for $100 / month, given time to work on it. I am not sanguine about my ability to sell thousands of copies of a book/ebook -- my most loyal blog readers number in the hundreds, if that. I'd also expect massive pushback on the prices that I think make sense -- for examples, take a look at every launch of a non-software info product on HN. (I think I'd be particularly at risk for that because a non-trivial portion of my audience likes the fact that I started a business for $60 -- and when you have $60 in your budget, $X00 on a book is right out.)

There are also psychic costs to me. I kind of value my participation at HN and the Business of Software, for example. It is my sanity-preserving lifeline. I'd really hate to have every post carry the implicit disclaimer "Warning! He is trying to sell you something."
by far the most interesting thing iv'e read in a long itme.
It would be scary, but wouldn't really do anything to the plane.

I'm pretty sure everything in a plane is fire resistant. Plus the low air pressure would make the fire burn poorly.

Alcohol mixed with water doesn't burn well enough to do much.

Maybe if they sell 95% alcohol (Ever Clear). But even so, while it might hurt someone, it would not cause mass casualties. And if you wanted to hurt someone you don't need to go on a plane first.
How LEGOs are made
when you study topics deeply enough they start to converge with other topics. at their heart a lot of subjects use similar abstractions and methodologies.

but I think chess is actually an exception. chess requires chess knowledge.
I think Fred Wilson and Ben Horowitz actually agree with each other. They are basically both saying "Find a market that you are likely to dominate, and then go big or go home."

And, Marc Andreesen/Ben Horowitz had an advantage that 99.9% of all entrepreneurs didn't have - they were basically able to staff their first 50 engineers from the best of the best, which then allowed them to hire the next 200+ engineers at a higher calibre ("A" people typically hire better people than "C" people) - Hell, at one point they were hosting "Interqueues" at Marc's house - Interviews + BBQs - hiring engineers at a clip of a half dozen a day.

But, I do tend to agree with Fred Wilson more so than Ben - What Marc/Ben did was unique, they sat down with a few colleagues (Insik Rhee, Tim Howes) said "What kind of company would we like to build", thought about their experience trying to on-board companies at AOL, and said, "Hey, that's a really tough problem. Let's automate it."

They sketched out _very_ rough business proposal. Did a few pitches with basically little-to-no formal business plan (Heck, for all I know they just had their pitch), and then Boom, they had money. How many entrepreneurs can pull that off?

It was also 1999/2000 and money was being dropped right, left and center just before the bubble burst. Another difference from today's market.

Ironically, Marc agrees with Fred Wilson when it comes to _marketing_. He always used to say (I don't know if this is still the case) - "Spending large amounts of money on branding _before_ you have the great product is just a waste. Build a great, solid product, and then move onto branding / marketing. Until then, spend the money on engineering, not marketing." (I actually disagree with him there - sometimes you have to get out a little ahead of the market, and get in your customers brain, so when you do have a product, you already have their attention. )
Airlines limit the alcohol content allowed in the cabin. Even before all the liquid silliness, you were not allowed to take "strong rum" from the Caribbean in cabin. All your best fuels will not be allowed.

(The rum distilleries output something like 160 proof. This is diluted with water and aged to the rum most people know, which is legal for export. Locals however, can bring containers to the distillery and have them filled directly from the still.)
> Inferior is pejorative,

Also: accurate.

> and I find "worse quality" to be highly misleading, as if every Theora video will look like something on Youtube,

Also: strictly true that it in apples-to-apples comparisons, H.264 will win in nearly every case. And not by insignificant margins the way audio formats might.

> but I'd happily admit to "lower quality per bit" (in fact I do in the post you replied to) which is okay because it has other advantages and room to grow.

Both are mature video codecs, not kids going to college to find themselves. Unless you are a codec implementor or enthusiast, why do you give a shit how much “room to grow” that your codec has?

Like I said before: All MozillaCo is doing is lying to themselves and ensuring that Firefox uses continue to watch video on Flash—an even more toxic presence on the web. The industry has already moved past them and their reluctance; they're having their argument years too late.
Startups paid that much because they didn't buy lots of air time and they went directly to networks (paid "retail") instead of going through a media planning and buying agency. Most startups couldn't afford to go to major media planning and buying agencies because they mostly had very high monthly commitments and were owned by the major ad agency holding companies.

Nowadays with Google, it's much easier and much cheaper to get your ads on TV, but it's still much more expensive than going through media buying agencies.
Does anyone have any experience with Amazon Payments? I Was considering them as a viable alternative to our existing PayPal solution.
There are three companies listed on the American stock exchanges with over 1,000 employees who sell products which directly compete with me. (They are, of course, much less important to those companies than they are to me.) Software-wise, there were ~15 shareware products and ~7 web applications last time I checked a few years ago. At least three of them actually know what they're doing (and one of those was launched by a participant from another forum I'm on who, ahem, paid me the sincerest form of flattery).

In a broader sense of the word "competition", my program is a proper subset of Microsoft Excel, I compete with the world's savviest Internet publishers (like Demand Media) for large portions of the queries of interest to me, and a portion of my queries are dual-use for a multi-billion a year industry. (Teachers are not the only folks interested in the top ten for [bingo cards].)

I mean, its not like I went and made a URL shortener or zip file extractor, but I also didn't go make something so staggeringly unique the world had not heard of it before or since.
You're making things up at this point. I suggest you revisit how you arrive at conclusions and what constitutes evidence - you're hurting yourself by not being able to tell correct from desired.
Github solved this problem. Everyone knows how to contribute to a Github project. Click the fork button, commit your patch, send pull request.
Will IE9 support anything other than only some versions of Windows?
> Yeah, sure. S-expresssions are literals in Lisp, and can be "parsed" calling eval.

No on both counts.

(1) S-expressions aren't literals.

(2) s-expressions are not "parsed" by calling lisp eval. Lisp eval's argument is an s-expression - it doesn't parse anything. (It also doesn't read anything.) Lisp read turns character sequences into s-expressions.

> But JSON wins over s-expressions too, because s-expressions are too simple. How do you represent John Smith as an s-expression?

If you'd like, exactly the same way you'd represent it in JSON, because lisp's read handles a superset of the JSON datatypes.

> software that consumes s-expressions has to know how to interpret their structure

As does JSON.

Take your example John Smith. What JSON datatype do you expect to get? (JSON just has numbers, strings, arrays, booleans, and hashes, where the keys have a restricted format.)
One key difference which the post doesn't really touch on is that when it's a company everyone's interests are more closely aligned (or at least should be...).

On the other hand even if you find where to contribute to with open source you can't be as sure your patch will be taken.

(Although as mentioned on LWN: http://lwn.net/Articles/379109/ it seems Google have managed to fork libjingle, so even Google can't get this right.)
Good advice. Also, in most states setting up an LLC is cheap and easy. Here in Colorado, it's only $50 and a fairly thin form that only ask for the obvious stuff like; what's the company name, what's your name(s), etc.
Most of the responses here have been in response to whether or not there are apps out there that do this for you.

However, if you want to go down the road of building this yourself, it's not really that involved. Take a look at ActiveMerchant if you're doing Rails. It helps you integrate with a good list of payment gateways. Then, sign up for that gateway + get a merchant account. This is probably the best way to get the lowest fees.

For example, I believe CDGCommerce offers merchant accounts at $10/month with a free payment gateway. The typical $0.30 + 2.9% (or whatever your rate is, depending on risk, etc.) applies.

Another path for this is Website Payments Pro via Paypal. With IPN you can easily sync your user subscription status with the latest payment information.

Doing recurring billing via subscription fees, like all programming is handling corner cases. For this domain, the corner case is a combination of invalid credit card numbers, expired numbers, perpetual zero-balance but valid numbers, overzealous anti-fraud filters, overdrawn accounts, or even temporary credit card numbers. Which ever service or integration path you choose, make sure you're covering the these corner cases.

Based on all this, my advice is to build in-house so you have the flexibility of changing policies on-the-fly with regards to how you handle those above cases. YMMV.
Do Animals Commit Suicide?
Make sure you sleep well and eat well beforehand. If you are an gym rat like me, a workout is a good way to get the endorphins flowing. I think it's about getting your mind and body into a state where they can offer peak performance the next day.
Is it a coincidence that the intel cloud-on-a-chip also has 48 cores? http://techresearch.intel.com/articles/Tera-Scale/1826.htm i.e., is it marketing to the crowd that would want one of those from intel?
Wow, I am a flaming liberal, and normally I don't even think twice about general trolling by politicians like this, but that is ridiculous. Have these guys ever cooked anything in their entire life that wasn't labeled "Chef Boyardee?"

Salt has more properties than just something you sprinkle on-top to get more "flavor." Some basic foods that require salt as a functional ingredient: bread (including cakes, muffins, bagels, etc) where it regulates yeast activity, cheese, brined poultry (the only poultry worth eating if you ask me), marinated meats, cured meats. Pasta and most vegetables also taste very bland unless they're infused with salts during cooking to bring out their flavors.

I would even argue that half of the art of cooking is when and how to salt things properly.
I'm wondering if most of that is attributable to conscious/rational factors, though, and not the ego depletion phenomenon examined in the study. How much of it is learning to recognize patterns that presage tests of will and dealing with them by some optimized heuristic that doesn't tax willpower much at all? A sense of temptation. An awareness of our position on a slippery slope. Experience.

The test would be to see how you perform with novel depleting tasks (like writing without certain letters) where no such learned heuristics might apply.

That's what I mean by a meta-adaptation. It just makes more sense to me that you can learn to manage the demands on your self-control than to boost the total supply of it. It's more like time, to me.

It may of course be some mixture of both, but I always find it interesting when people's mental models of seemingly universal experience differ.
Speaking of the Atom I have noticed that just about everyone had put out little mac mini type computers except that they use the Atom. The mac mini on the other hand is pretty much a laptop in a box. It uses a mobile core 2 duo which results in better power usage and way better performance. Why hasn't any manufacture out there created a mac mini clone? I spent last weekend trying to find one to buy, but in the end it looks like I will be buying a mini to put Linux. The closest I came on the PC side was to get a laptop and turn off the screen.... I was honestly expecting it to be easy to find a PC version of the mac mini.
Using current browsers with fast javascript engines sites like GMail work fine on 300Mhz machines.
I guess I don't understand what you mean by "there". Selling the company would only cause further progress. Your employees don't have to stay there, and you don't have to quit. You can sell the company, keep doing the same things, either at 37Signals or some other place, and just be a lot richer at the same time.

I really am not seeing a detriment still. You just seem to value the brand 37Signals so much that you're not willing to let another control it. This is silly in my mind, because it's just a brand, and there's no reason to believe you'd lose a lot of control in a potential acquisition anyway, or that even if you did, you couldn't go and start something else and keeping develop Rails apps.

This all presumes a good deal. I'm not saying you should just sell to anybody, because you shouldn't, and I wouldn't. But it is a little overboard to claim that you'll never sell, not even for 10 or 20 times your annual revenue even if everything else about the deal was good.

I understand not wanting to let someone else run your product into the ground. I know how painful that is, because it's happened to me before. But not every potential buyer is like that.
Other than coolness, why reinvent this wheel? It's very easy to load and query RDF graphs with jena and sparql http://openjena.org/ARQ/Tutorial/query1.html you don't even have to do something horrible like learn basic java syntax, there is a command line...
bin/sparql --data=doc/Tutorial/vc-db-1.rdf --query=doc/Tutorial/q1.rq

Jena's the defacto standard library for dealing with RDF atm, it's pretty easy to use.
People don't usually rush from their TV to their computer when they see an interesting URL, though, so you really don't know what effects the TV ad had on your site.
Not NYC, the whole State of New York.

attempts to ban salt in restaurants – not true, this stupid bill which will never see a vote or chance of passage, only bans the cooks from adding it. It would put the salt under control of the diner at the table.

limiting the salt intake of adults – Nothing in this asinine bill to limit the salt intake of adults. It simply puts the adults in control of it.

It's a dumb enough bill without make it sound dumber. It was read once and has been referred to the Committee on Health where it will presumably die, probably to polite laughter.

(I am a tiny bit sympathetic toward people whose doctors have told them to lower sodium or die and are wondering if that bowl of chicken noodle soup will kill them. But I want my food cooked in salt.)
There's all sorts of levels of skill in the market. You need to demonstrate your skills first - either an open source project or host an SVN with some example code. There is no harm in writing a place looking for a senior dev, they often have other openings. I hope you're already checking dice.com ....
Hmm... yes Sridhar Vembu of Zoho. He wasn't a single founder though. He also acted as their offshore marketing guy in the beginning.

Atleast thats what I know from the recent Mixergy podcast
http://99designs.com/?o=3
I think these guys often give good results with a similar model.
The thing is, a modern laptop in a box is way more power than lots of typical users need. If you're not a gamer, all you really need is something like an Atom and some hardware assisted video decoding.
I think a "startup" is an innovative company that has existed for a short period of time. If it's software, it's probably still in beta. A startup is probably in early research and development stages. A startup is probably looking for some outside funding and the founders have some exit strategy in mind (Acquisition or IPO).

A pillow store is none of the above things so it's most probably not considered a startup. A game development shop can be a startup if it meets some or all of these things. Web development firms can be startups when they make web applications for the public or businesses to use (like 37signals).

Just my 2 cents.
It looks like you asked the same question twice... but here is what I said in your other posting:

I think a "startup" is an innovative company that has existed for a short period of time. If it's software, it's probably still in beta. A startup is probably in early research and development stages. A startup is probably looking for some outside funding and the founders have some exit strategy in mind (Acquisition or IPO).

A pillow store is none of the above things so it's most probably not considered a startup. A game development shop can be a startup if it meets some or all of these things. Web development firms can be startups when they make web applications for the public or businesses to use (like 37signals).

Just my 2 cents.
I will be losing my Job today...
I'm employed in a software development company as senior programmer, I have a slightly average pay, and good position as head, and being a key person who created their products to keep the company from running, I was ensured to have a full-time job and out of poverty for the coming days, months or years...

But in the past few months, I felt I was bored of the things I do, because back in College I spend 2 years doing this kind of desktop based software, and now after 2 years, I keep doing the same thing...

I remember while back in College, I enjoy doing web applications and creating and designing web UI's and I was really good at it making websites attractive and at the same time, useful and functional.

This is my real passion, creating innovative web applications and solutions, and also designing it on the process.

2 years ago, I learned Python and CherryPy, and in practice locally, I was very productive and be able to create a very nice web application with it. Then a year ago, I learned Ruby, then Rails, and I was also very productive with it.

I have a pending project with my current company, and my development is slow because I don't enjoy doing scripts, desktop applications anymore, but I was making sure that I will meet the deadline, after all, it was a piece of cake coding.

And now, I posted something on my Facebook, a very cool web application that I made and uploaded to heroku which I envision that will change the way people do things... But my project manager and employer responded to that Facebook post, and I have sms messages from them asking me where's my reports, my progress with the company project, and an e-mail is also sent to me asking me all the stuff about that I should be finishing and doing... Additionally, I'm expecting a bad e-mail in progress...

This is what I really want to do, but I have pending jobs in my current company, and also my salary advances isn't paid yet, and I don't have money because I use it all to pay the bills...

Now I'm in a situation, where I will be facing poverty and unemployment in the next few weeks or months, but deep in my heart, I will pursue what I really want to do and what makes me happy... I will pursue this vision that I have, but no money to buy domain, cigarettes, and will be starving...

Do you have any advice to give?
For now, you should just take my word for this.

PHP is the least of WordPress' problems. Or. Well. Not the worst of WordPress' problems.
This totally blows my mind. I'm sorry I have nothing terribly useful to add, but the idea that you could do meaningful work on data without really ever knowing the data is... well, it's weird. :)
As a loyal NPR supporter, I feel that I have to correct the complete mis-representation of NPR's funding presented in this article.

It is true that NPR received a generous gift from the Kroc family ($200 million in 2003, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A6973-2003Nov6?lang...). However, in that same year, NPR's operating budget was $100 million. Assuming a generous 5% utilization of that endowment, that would only pay 10% of the budget.

In fact, NPR's web page states that it receives a little under 10% of its annual budget from "major gifts," while nearly a third (the largest single fraction) comes from pledges and annual memberships. (see http://www.npr.org/about/privatesupport.html)

I guess your statement that listener donations are "a fraction" of NPR's operating budget is true. One third IS a fraction, after all. But to say that NPR "really doesn't need your money" is a gross factual error.

I, for one, would like to see you post a correction.
I like Ben's point that being lean isn't a goal in itself for a startup. Dominating a market and not running out of cash are the goals. Running lean often helps with these goals, especially early on, but if fattening up a bit helps you dominate the market or not run out of cash (through revenue), that's what you should do.

I had a friend who ran a small business, and was overly concerned with costs. It was almost like he was more interested in reducing the expense line than increasing the revenue line. So that's what happened - both numbers went down, and he's working on his own today.
Pretend I donate a hundred dollars to NPR. I get a tote, mug, and some other stuff that I might value (i.e., otherwise purchase) at $50, but is nominally valued at $10.

I then get to deduct $90 from income on my tax return, and assuming I'm in a high tax bracket, I get to pay about $30 less in taxes.

Hence, I effectively donated $20 - while the recipient effectively received $90.

Not quite cost free, but not terrible. And yes, I know it's cheating to deduct the 'value' of the gifts - but it's the only semi-reasonable thing I can think of.
I was thinking the exact same thing...
Braintree offers managed recurring billing and is also a merchant account provider. http://bit.ly/braintree
A Custody Battle, Supersized, Over Marvel Superheroes