skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It only has to fit in a single SMS message if the tweet is being consumed over SMS. There's no reason to do link shortening in other user interfaces.
everything happens for a reason, I am sure you will create something create after this.
Thanks for sharing your experiences. I have found I really _enjoy_ doing work from the command line. It just feels natural even if I am still reaching to my "How Linux Works" book every 2 commands. :)

I suppose right now a much more difficult thing for me is coming to grips with more fundamental differences in the OSes. For example, if I install a program on windows it goes into /Program Files/ and I know how to interact with it. If I apt-get in ubuntu its often unclear to me where to modify it's configuration, how to launch it, etc. This is best illustrated by the 4 hours I burned getting nginx up and running.

I am certain that this is just me not being used to the conventions but.. Well I don't know what my point is, honestly I think I am just venting now. :)

edit: Question on the VIM/Emacs suggestion. I started dabbling in VIM, but as a long time VS.NET user (I can navigate through a visual studio environment like a fish through water) it just felt.. Small. I assumed I would be better off going to an IDE (I am using python, so there are plenty to choose from). Do you have any comments on this? Is an IDE a 'drug' I could benefit from learning to break off?
The fact that he is the "CEO of one of the web's biggest companies" means he earned the right to decide to write code if he wants to. Successful businesses aren't created by following every principle in the latest business books.
This is probably the least insightful article I've read on the future of Flash. The author rightly comments on Flash's growing power as an application platform, but then ignores that entirely by discussing how Google can offer an alternative video platform. Sure, Flash is dominant in online video streaming currently, but that doesn't mean that it goes away when the niche can be covered by an alternative technology.

Flash is so much more than video - let me know when there is a true alternative vector-based non-linear animation and application platform.
> $50k/startup management fee

What?!
> In January 1989, I came to the United States to pursue my graduate study.

That's just in time.
Technically speaking, what makes Google Chrome fast? (Part II)
We can live without many things, but that's irrelevant if we still choose to consume them. Perhaps ethically they have no value but they sure have financial value, that's why they're being produced and sold, then bought by us. We give them their income.
I have to agree with pg. There's an abundance of itches out there waiting to be scratched. Just build something that scratches an itch not common among hackers.
It seems likely to me that the code of the Facebook of today is probably of a pretty different sort than that initial hacking. The problems are very different.

But it's also likely that Mr. Z. has kept up with those changes, on some level at least.
Bootup Labs is structured as an investment plus a services contract. They give you $50k in exchange for 5% equity, then you immediately pay the $50k back to them in exchange for the office space, accounting services, legal services, mentoring, et cetera. Then they give you a $100k line of credit which converts (at their option) at 1% equity per $10k.

It's a very effective way of protecting themselves from downside risk -- if all the startups bomb, the startup founder have nothing and the investors have nothing, but Bootup Labs still has their $50k/startup -- which might be part of the reason why they've had trouble convincing VCs to invest. I think many VCs would be skeptical of a startup CEO who said "we have no revenue and a completely untested business model, but we're going to pay ourselves $100k salaries with your money".
You have a point, but I still think it makes sense initially to build something that's just good enough for yourself. The you-are-not-your-user realization happens quickly after you get users who are not you.
All Canadian startup hopefuls are/will be watching for an official response closely.
That really sucks!
But dude, why give up on the idea? you're selling the domain and moving on? Incubators aren't necessary.. keep plugging away and launch anyway.
Danny, one of the bootuplabs founders just posted this comment on the post.

/////////////

This is not how it went down Jamie. After everything that we did for you and Steven, I'm shocked at how you have twisted the truth for PR reasons.

- you were in our office for 2 months, not 3.

- you program is 5%-15% for $150k over 8 months

- you received $6k over that 2 months

- we received nothing in return.

- we paid your legal fees.

- we introduced you to many people who you can still call on today.

We are not out of money, we just closed a round. It was a condition of their investment that we let you go.

Yes, it wasn't an ideal situation, and we didn't plan on it working out this way. But in the end, I made sure that you got the better end the deal

/////////////

Sad to see them trying to argue over facts when these guys moved across the country and gave up everything to be there, then they act like they should be happy to have even had the chance. Wow.
I shouldn't have said that Bootup Labs had "no money" - I should have put "no money for us."

I'm not trying to suggest that Bootup Labs is bankrupt or anything, I apologize.
Not really. Sometime in life shit just happens for no good reason.
I don't understand all the down votes. This article, for instance, links from the Joel On Software home page. There's no reason to post it here.
3-5% depending on the stats provider.
I shouldn't have said that Bootup Labs had "no money" - I should have put "no money for us."

I think we all understood that, given that your post mentioned that 3 of the 7 companies in the cohort were not being cut loose.
Yeah, that's what I assumed. He probably just misses coding and decided to do something for a demo
I wouldn't say so much "making their own" as they are cloning & tweaking the 2 CANDUs we sold 'em a few decades ago.

And yes, CANDU reactors can operate on thorium fuel cycles (lucky for them).
As a manager of Bootup, I can assure you that we haven't been personally paid anything. The $50k is funnelled through the company to maximize canadian tax credits, which can amount to a meaningful amount of money. And it's used to pay for rent, legal, accounting, and other services that are for the benefit of the startup.
My response which I posted:

Hey Danny.

I apologize that you feel like I'm twisting the truth.

It was the last week in January until the end of last Month. While we were there 3 months of the year, you are correct 2 months would be more accurate,

I was just getting the $100k off of the Bootup website, I understood that we got $150k, but that $50k went back to Bootup, is that not what the original terms were?

You did pay our rent and our legal fees to get incorporated. I mentioned the rent, but I didn't mention the legal fees. I apologize.

I didn't suggest that Bootup was closing down or was out of money.

I wouldn't suggest that I got the better end of the deal as it was extremely expensive to move to and live in Vancouver.

I wish you all well.
More or less yes, using the NDK.
...and then it's turtles all the way down!
Seems like an RPG to that exposed balance hardware will take it right out.
Shaders in clojure, revisited
Tweets already diverge from what will fit in an SMS. For example, 140 chars of unicode won't fit.
I made a Chrome extension to show how you surf all over Wikipedia
This was entirely predictable.
I don't want to sound cocky, but I could have saved Dean a lot of grief and time if I had the chance before he launched the segway. The reason the segway failed is because people look like fucking dorks when they ride them. I'm surprised Jobs didn't make that remark (maybe thats what he meant when he was criticizing the design).

When they revealed it on the Today show they had people riding around on them with bike helmets, sweater vests, and bowties. I've ridden one, mind you, and it is an incredible machine.. but I wouldn't be caught dead riding one of those things in public. There's a reason Jobe rides one in Arrested Development.

For all Dean's smarts, it was his inability to connect with the every day person that caused the flop. Never underestimate the power of cool.
I'll have a Firefox version soon. Here's an example of how I went from PhD to Burma and then some: http://wikitrail.zetabee.com/share?n=wt4bc6884b2a0959.146948...

For xkcd fans, this is the problem I'm trying to tackle: http://xkcd.com/214/
For me coding is definately therapeutic. I'm getting my MD and doing gene therapy research at the same time.

Doing some coding during the weekends make me relax (and angry if I cant fix stupid bugs :P). It makes me totally forget the other stuff so that I can start freshly again on monday.
Interesting that those things are missing from C as well, but nobody seems to mention that...

(Common Lisp has mature FFI and wrappers around things like DBI and graphics libraries. Clojure gives you the JVM libraries for your sins, and I dare you to seriously argue that the JVM has no libraries to its name.)
As a manager of Bootup, I can assure you that we haven't been personally paid anything.

My apologies. I had understood that you were drawing a salary from Bootup Labs based on a conversation I had with Boris a few months ago, but I can't remember exactly what he said, and it's quite possible that I misinterpreted him.

Even if you're not personally getting paid anything, I think $50k is a rather generous fee given that other startup accelerators don't seem to need any such fee at all.
I think a better argument is that once you get to a certain level you don't have the time to write code anymore. More importantly you probably don't have the time to read code anymore, and presumably at facebook, there's a lot of code to read every week just to keep up.
"Real Hackers" generate black holes, constructing them in turn to generate sub-Universes, causing a Universal exception, which can be used as a buffer overflow exploit in the Laws of Physics. Basically, if you can figure out how to do this, you'll be Neo.
I think you should make it a page action instead of a browser action because there is no reason for it to appear unless I'm on wikipedia.

http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/pageAction.html

Button space on chrome is valuable real estate. Don't want zombies sucking up the space when not needed. Cool extension though.

I'd use it if you made it a page action.
>I didn't suggest that Bootup was closing down or was out of money.

The title of this posting is "Moved to Canada to participate in a startup incubator that had no money"...
Does anyone know if google gives users the ability to block entire domains from their search results? This is a feature that would benefit not only google, but also reedit, digg, and hacker news dare I say. I would block ask.com in a heartbeat.
on osX (or any other OS), if apps save as they go, excessive usage can be solved with a kill -9 whenever the OS likes..
It is a content script that calls the background.html. The content script only runs on Wikipedia/TVTropes domains. The browser action is just to open the WikiTrail page. This way you can access it from the toolbar instead of first visiting Wikipedia.

Edit: Ok, I understand what you mean. I'll try to make it a page action and post an update here.
It's an answer to the thread about Mark Zuckerberg still writing code, where TechCrunch asked if Bill Gates still coded 5 years after Microsoft was founded. That's why it was (re)posted.
Joel was a fun read back then.
Is there a practical difference?
It should have been that way from the beginning. This 'cascade of error messages' style is pretty damn bad.

Also, the compiler must quit on the first error: Continuing with the known-bad state is not only asking for trouble, it's inviting it in and setting up the guest room for it to stay a month.

We aren't on mainframes anymore. Getting an error message means you go back to the editor immediately, not in a week when your next time slot comes around.
It's not that much different from many high schools it sounds. Or a minimum wager job. No talking, cellphones or listening to music while in class unless your on your break. Many schools confiscate cell phones on sight. Bag searches, body searches, locker searches, drug tests and metal detectors are typical in many schools. And you got to follow teachers orders or your marks (wages) are docked. They'll tolerate you being a bit of an ass if your productive though. Hell when I was a gas station attendant & hot dog cart worker working alone, I had to avoid washroom breaks altogether/as much as possible, and make them quick!

Also, you live in shared rooms / dorms at boarding schools too.
They can filter blogs, but can't filter the dangerous stuff.
If I knew where to buy an alot, I'd give them one.
Hacker News for Education
Good to know! (I was teasing, mainly, but did wonder a bit if Mark's coy response was pure affect or not.)
The one that trisects an angle is so much cooler but I can't remember where to find it.
Suggested reading: http://www.amazon.com/Candide-Optimism-Classics-Francois-Vol...
Or more aptly, why do I care if my text editor is beautiful? Emacs in a black and white, monospaced term window beats TextMate or Coda most of the time. But then, you can't take a pretty picture of usability.
I don't choose to consume them.

Many people choose to consume them because they are manipulated by advertisement and unreasonable societal norms. If the wage of these workers were doubled, no one in the US would notice. Do you really scrutinize $0.20 on a $30.00 mouse?
I could be wrong, but it was my understanding that, on POSIX systems at least, the 1.8 MRI interpreter was smart enough to use non-blocking IO underneath the hood when performing IO calls and have a thread release its hold on the GIL when it is performing IO. That way, another thread could run while the first thread waits for an IO operation to complete. Either way, whether or not a software-level thread scheduler optimizes by using non-blocking IO or not is orthogonal to whether or not it schedules preemptively or cooperatively.
Wow, they're really clutching at straws. The legal fees were presumably spent setting up a Canadian corporation. What use is that to the founders now? Similarly, the rent being paid - the cost of throwing all your stuff out (and presumably having to buy it again later) will be for most people way higher than a few months worth of rent.

It's often too easy to jump to the wrong conclusion... but I'm struggling to see a decent explanation for this. And anything less than a full apology is a huge red flag.
I'm not sure if I'm willing to commit to a button that only serves as a bookmark. Other extensions handle this by using the options page for such a page. Button spam is a serious problem on Chrome, everyone wants to be a browser action when few actually offer meaningful features for such buttons. Xmarks is a great example of this. It's just a menu.

On another note you might want to submit this to /r/chrome subreddit on reddit.
Not sure why this was downvoted. It's a little negative, but I do agree from this experience and you blogging about Jamie something better will come along!

Good luck and is the weather in Phoenix still "100 and above it's a scorcher out there" :) ? You emailed me this summer re: my start-up. Good luck!
As the linked page states, this is the first distribution where the continuation plugin is part of the main release.
During my time there in late 2008, there were around 10 layers to the top in Windows Live.
Wait... why are people upvoting this? What's the relevance?
If you're with anyone you don't want to be with you're doing it wrong.
The appearance of a significantly "cheaper" version of the product cheapens the brand, and makes customers wonder why they are paying so much. Potentially killing the rest of the product line-up. It has happened to every industry several times before, including the book industry.
I always assumed elves.
It freaks me out a bit that hedge funds have so much money. I don't understand how they create that much societal value.
How to Creating a Realistic Looking Button with CSS3
Previously Jay on anomalyinnovations was created the Cadmus “post” button in Photoshop and it was essentially three images for the different states. He wanted to use this style for all our buttons, but doing it with single images is not a good idea. So he set about creating the same style of the buttons with CSS3.
I feel bad posting this (and will be voted down probably), but why is this significant?
http://i.imgur.com/cXxdv.png
Apple cares, because they don't want any significant portion of their application marketplace on the iThings to be controlled by any single API vendor, which would give that vendor market and PR leverage that Apple doesn't want them to have. It's not about compatability or looks or anything else...

Just think about the transition from PPC to INtel. For Xcode users - this was pretty much cake. The had to add some code in some cases, but it was a fairly easy task.
If, on the other hand, some other compiler run by someone else, hostile to apple, was the preferred platform for most apple developers, apple would have had a hell of a time pulling off a move like that.
The alarm clock thing, right? :)
The Peekaboo Paradox
What I learned from this blog post is that I need to visit Vancouver someday.
Seminal UK tech journalist, Guy Kewney, has died. Goodbye, old friend.
And this is why you don't embellish titles. Even when retitling your own original post.
It could be any activity you know you have to do, but instead you end up procrastinating, or doing totally unrelated.

For example, you know you have to finish that school project, but instead of getting into "work" mode, your mind starts to wander and you go and watch youtube videos all day instead.
That's exactly what sexism is. It's not always necessarily a bad thing.
How hard is it to set up a Vancouver startup independently, if you have 2-3 US citizens who want to relocate? Assume you have $100-200k of your own funding.

Gaming the tax credits seems like it takes a bit of effort, but lowers the effective tax rate substantially below even Nevada.
It would be cool to see how the 7z archive compares to rzip, which (I think) might have the largest input size window of them all (up to 900MB). This software was written by Andrew Tridgell of rsync fame. It's major drawback is that it cant work on stdio and uses tons of RAM.
I can validate this. I was an intern in '06 and routinely spelunked the org chart. I recall seeing up to 11 or 12 layers from bottom to top. I was 8 or 9 from Ballmer myself, if you regard my mentor as my immediate superior.
Maybe we are part of a test to see if female bloggers get more upvotes on social news sites.
Why the false dichotomy? A black and white editor can be just as usable as a colorful, syntax-highlighted one. Furthermore, it's an extremely subjective judgement.
The reason the segway failed is because people look like fucking dorks when they ride them.

Congratulations, you just killed the bicycle!

It's more than just looking like a dork... it's the image of laziness that you get from riding a Segway. The thing is useless for travelling anywhere you couldn't otherwise walk. It's fine in limited situations where one would have to walk a beat all day, or travel around a large factory floor, but most of us will never have to do that.
You shouldn't have accepted companies that you couldn't afford to pay. You shouldn't have asked them to move to a different country. Very reckless and irresponsible and to then attack the poster as "twisting the truth" about tiny details seems even worse to me. You should be sorry. You should show some humility.
The Segway needs a seat -- the whole idea is wrong.

The cool kids slouch or lounge, because they're at ease (or faking it).

... or instead of feet side-by-side you go for one foot ahead, one back like a skater.
How I Learned to Love Windows Media Player
you guys are thinking of multi-jointed arms. Simplify! Just make it so that all the things line up within some tolerance as they roll down the line and you're golden.

Also, removing manual labor jobs means that there is an available labor pool for something more productive that the robots CAN'T do. Broken glass fallacy anyone?
About to release an iPhone app...which Ad network should I be using?
Title says it all.

Should I use Quattro? Or is it safe to use AdWhirl still? Any advice?
New Online Calculus Textbook
Founder Mood Swings: Lessons from a Quantitative Analysis
Correct me if I am reading too much into their response. But it sounds like they were at the tail end of closing a round of financing. The investors didn't like some of the startups in the current cohort so they made it a requirement that Bootup cut them from the program before the new round closed.

So instead of honoring their word they choose to take the money. Very poor business practice IMO.
http://www.jimloy.com/geometry/trisect.htm#tools

But of course these are not the Euclidean tools.
MIT Student Develops $3 Cutting-Edge Healing Device, Field Tested in Haiti
Bootup Labs has posted their side of the story on their blog:

http://blog.bootuplabs.com/2010/04/14/wertz-joins-board-firs...
Pay It Forward
A month or two ago, I read about about someone (maybe vibhavs?) giving away a lot of old programming books they were done with, and was impressed with their generosity. I've been working hard to live simpler.

I've got 3 extra external hard drives that are unused (but not in box) and I'm just not getting any use out of them. As pretty as they are, I know they never will from me due to my overabundance of space already. I want to give them to someone who needs them (well, probably 3 someones) and can give them a little more use than I. I don't want any money, I'll even cover shipping (in the US please). If you're thankful, or even if you're just reading this, consider doing a random act of kindness for a stranger you meet tomorrow. Pay for a coffee or buy a lunch, it'll change their day.

Details:
All HD's are identical.
1TB Western Digital Green Power @ 7200RPM in a Speed Metal copper-colored case (which you can see here: http://i.imgur.com/nzcE8.jpg).

I'm going to attempt to choose randomly provided there's enough interest. I haven't considered the format and I don't want to just do "first one to see it" but I'll do my best to be fair.
It was always intended to be a backend for whatever language you want; it just didn't get any real use other than the Scheme frontend until recently.
http://tw.it would be killer
The goal of the Xiph.org Foundation was never make Vorbis or Theora take over the world. The goal was to provide royalty-free multimedia codecs. If VP8 is open sourced and they make the required patent grants, the world gets a royalty-free video codec. We win.

We worked on Vorbis and Theora because no one else was going to do it. Here we are a decade later on the cusp of much of our dream finally coming true.

disclaimer: I co-founded, managed, and still sit on the Board of Directors of the Xiph.org Foundation.
I downvoted it, because I see it as a stupid comment for situations where something (partly) out of your control happens and you lose. "It's going to be ok" from a friend is nice then, but a comment that "Everything happens for a reason" from a stranger is just weird. Not only he agrees that the bad thing was supposed to happen, he implies that he knows there was "a greater plan" and that he has some knowledge about the whole situation that allows him to predict your future. I hate this phrase, because it's complete BS.

So yeah - downvoted for personal reasons ;)

Good luck to the guys.
I in no way meant the above to be negative. I was only trying to be encouraging. We have all had bad things happen, it's all about how you bounce back.
bit.ly appeared to be the front runner for an acquisition in that Twitter arena.

Their analytics are impressive:

http://bit.ly/info/cjwkQI

http://bit.ly/info/oQJM