skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Legalization, taxation and regulation.

Please.
http://www.amazon.com/Sony-MDR7506-Professional-Diaphragm-He...

Seems to be even cheaper now, sitting at around 80 bucks.
ArticleAgent: a web utility for archiving what you read on the web
David Byrne's Journal: 05.26.10: The Architecture of Fear
Guess I should of been more clear. We are a marketing startup. We have contracts with businesses and our product is sold to consumers (average Joe).

On the consumer end, everything is perfect. Sales are up and user base is doubling every 2 weeks. Mixed responsibility.
(I do customer support, SEO, design, etc and we share marketing ideas)

On the business end, we are still stuck with crappy deals: low margins, poor brands, etc. His responsiblity.

We are currently considering bringing in a sales guy/girl (for equity & comission). But while I still have a ton of work on the tech side, my co-founder who was supposed to be CEO and sales has so far failed on the sales dep and is not impressing me with his biz decisions nither. Thats the big worry.
It's not inappropriate for HN, but what would you contribute to this theoretical startup other than ideas?

As developers, we get pitches like this 5, 10, 20 or more times a week; I don't know too many people who are interested in jumping to work for an idea guy unless that idea guy can do sales, write code, do design, or otherwise contribute.

Hackers have lots of good ideas too, look at Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, etc... All of those companies were created by hackers who happened to also be idea guys; so just having the idea is not nearly enough.

Here's a good chance for you to work on your pitching skills ;)
> Translated from Flash to Objective-C by computer program: Not OK

Assuming you're referring to the CS5 feature, it converts Flash to byte-code, not Objective-C.
Why? Flag the posting then. It's certainly relevant to the article.
btw, as a fellow B of A customer who has had to deal with their crappy fraud algorithm as recently as last week, apparently you can go into the branch and have the 'fraud protection' removed.
Ah gotcha, that's fair enough. I must admit I do partial commits (which can be a little messy) simply because I'm worried about exactly what happened to you...
I wouldn't rate the motorcycle velcro mount high on my list of safety-conscious ideas, either.
Apps may not be he most used feature of a phone, but it is one of the things that really differentiate a platform. I'd be hesitant to move to android and not be able to use all the excellent, low-priced apps for the iPhone.
Thanks a lot for the feedback, I definitely get the sense that the forced comparison wasn't as great. I thought it was novel and had two big advantages: first, that it really mean you couldn't spam the voting mechanism to get your favorite up there, and second, I could just store the rating in the DB rather than a list of who has voted for what; it was a lot simpler.

However, I've heard from enough people that the experience wasn't great and the stats back it up. Up or down it is.
I guess so, but I'm no expert. I think this is an emerging industry, so I imagine it will be awhile before it is really turning profits.
Github is just another data point, but that's not how things look there at all:
http://github.com/languages
I'm using "rapid" as on a time scale of development and rollout of infrastructure technology. If the price of oil triples in 2 years, that's pretty darn rapid, because people will need to adjust their lifestyles for years before the alternatives and technological improvements can possibly be produced, delivered and installed.

I'm not suggesting the oil will all one day run out. But the sum production will drop. And the world's appetite will no longer be met and the bidding on the remaining oil production will skyrocket.

We saw this when the price of oil shot from 30/barrel to 100 over 3 years. Life changed and alternatives, though now-viable are still a decade away. And that was due a fairly small increase in total demand, due growth in Asia.

If you ignore the peak and wait until that first press conference from OPEC, when the world economy starts to regain its footing but they're still cutting production; your electric cars are a decade away from mass production. your solar panels are a decade away from mass production. your nuclear plants are a generation away from being built.
I doubt there's an enormous untapped market here, given the stats on the current number of users. And there's no particular economic reason to think that "prices would remain stable"; yes, demand might rise, but supply will definitely rise (even if supplies were materially constant supply effectively rises due to lowered total cost of production due to lower risk of imprisonment), and there's no a priori reason to believe that these two forces would be even remotely in balance, even if they both exist. That's the way a human brain thinks about things, not the way reality works.

High quality oregano is ~$5 a pound, according to a quick web search. Is there any particular reason to believe it wouldn't stabilize in roughly the same place give or take, say, 5x, if legalized? (And bear in mind that taxes not only don't go to the producer, they actually inhibit produce demand (http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Price_Theory/PThy_Cha... , search for "Who Pays Taxes?"), so that only makes it worse for these guys if the government starts taxes it punitively.) That's still over a full order of magnitude price drop from the estimates of MJ/lb I could dig up. It strikes me as very, very likely the bulk of the cost is compensation for taking on risk, rather than material or labor costs.
How does that affect where I want my keyboard relative to my monitor (i.e. positions of my eyes vs. hands)?
It's corny and silly, but as an instructional video, it's excellent. No dialog, no wasted effort, just teaching and demonstration in action. Feels like the first 40 minutes of WALL-E.
The original cross-compile from AIR may have had its own optimization issues. But oh, the irony if the speed at which Adobe has had to port this to Objective-C has resulted in a more sluggish app!

Fortunately, it looks like the native app is actually an improvement. Look at the video from February: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/02/the-wired-ipad-app-a-... The paging, zooming, and scrolling really does look smoother to me.
The Vehicle Assembly Building is an amazing sight, but is it also an example of how infinite budgets lead to non-optimal solutions?

SpaceX, who tend to be a lot more budget-conscious, assemble their rockets lying down and then hoist them to vertical, thusly:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrAr4ovtf9Q&feature=relat...

That seems a lot easier and cheaper. I'm tempted to think that maybe there's some factor that makes it more difficult to engineer a rocket that can handle sideways stresses as well as vertical stresses, but... heck, it's a rocket, they shouldn't be that fragile, should they?
"koke", or look up pronunciations for "coq al vin"
I'll do you one better. Something I found in a legacy codebase: reverse camel case code. Imagine rEADING tHIS aLLdAY. I felt like I was being partially yelled at all day while debugging.
"These are very basic statistics."

Too basic, comparing a whole nation's official rate to a (self-)selected subset that we can be certain doesn't match the former.
Sendspace.com: The.7.Adventures.of.Sinbad.2010.DVDRip.MaZiKa2daY.CoM.rmvb
Why did this need to be an open letter?
Flash Enthusiast Sends a Hidden Message To Steve Jobs
Completely agree.

The only issue I have is I don't want to see Philip Morris buy up all of NoCal and force everyone out of business.

I think good growers will still be able to demand a premium for their marijuana no matter what happens in November.
This is a game in the game theory sense. All the other strategies are dominated, except option 2. If all else is equal (and it isn't always), only companies that choose option 2 can survive by winning bids and keep playing.
This author may have a ... certain style to his posting illustrations, see this item on Ruby which has been posted to HN twice: http://nerds-central.blogspot.com/2010/05/knife-is-out-for-r...
There is no insight in this article. The author makes some asymmetric assertions. Google doesn't have to blahblah; Apple must blahblah; Apple can't take Google on as long as they ignore Flash.
or no
If you are both close being out of savings I wouldn't spend much time reading, rather, refine, learn and get doing. Also, I think there is a fundamental issue of you hiding behind a "frow away" account. Take more of a "We" vs. He/she approach, and try and improve the situation.
Attack it more head on, think all around and inside the box, communicate openly, and see what sort of improvement or resolution you can come up with.

Everyone is great at Sales if they are passionate enough about what they are trying to create. Think differently about that as well.

Who calls the shots? If it is you, you need to call a shot right now or drum this up as future business experience. A great leader will accept responsibility and do something about it.

Good luck as those who hope die fasting according to Hemingway. You have a great chance to be a leader and turn this situation around. However, it may be a case of cutting your losses and moving on. If you want something bad enough you can bounce back. Savings/Smavings... non-sense talk.

You can position the route of x (him staying) = Death/failure (if you believe this in his current role). Thus, you may be able to offer Y (maybe some "departure" equity shares) so you can maybe bring in some more aligned resources. Bottom line, this is your marriage, so you need to get communicating or you are bound for failure.

I hope this is not the case.
Good point; the best growers will always have a market for their product. NorCal is a lot like Napa Valley... some of the best wines in the world, if you know what I mean.
The real question is: in this metaphor, who is Burger King to Facebook's McDonalds?
Should we do a Hacker News Meetup Everywhere?
Meetup.com just introduced a feature that lets people all over the world hold a meetup on the same day.

I did one here in Buenos Aires when I first got here and it's helped me get things done in this city and make great friends.

What do you think of the idea of doing one everywhere?
I couldn't agree more. I wrote about this: http://techneur.com/post/555332733/business-marriage
That's odd, because the agreement they want their consumers to sign says "I'd sooner kill myself than criticize Apple, Inc.".

:-)
Very fair comment.

For starters i am a guy who has already had a very high level of success in another industry - investment banking -and while that industry isnt generating a lot of high fives at the moment, it is generally populated by high acheiving, smart, motivated people who know how to get things done. I am one of those people and succeeded at the highest levels generally working w small, growth companies on strategy, mergers and finance so i have some skills to bring to the table other than ideas.

Next, i am a good guy with vision and judgement and passion.

Finally, i have an office and will be committing all of my time to this idea AND i can help with $ if that makes sense.

This obviously only works if my cofounder is as passionate about the idea as i am so if you are at all interested get in touch!
Every time someone points out this tutorial and I see again the even_0 and even_S constructors of the even predicate, I am reminded of the quote where FORTRAN is called a high-level language because, unlike assembly, it doesn't force the programmer to make up names for intermediate expressions.

There are good reasons why even_0 and even_S need to have names, but I sure hope that we will one day look back on Coq as the assembly of computer-assisted proofs.
How to Reboot Your Sleep Cycle
I'm not quite following you there, you'll have to be a bit more clear. You write "we are a marketing startup", "we have contracts with businesses" and "our product".

Don't you mean their product ? Or are you reselling/rebranding ?

In other words, is the transaction with the end-user yours or is it make by the businesses that you have the contracts with ?

Getting big name brands to sign off on an unproven scheme can be pretty hard, using lesser known brands as a way to gain entry is by itself not such a bad thing, and bad margins can be incrementally improved upon proven performance, so you have some leverage there if you work at it.

I understand your reluctance to spell the whole thing out here but if you want actionable advice then you probably should take the plunge or take it off-line somehow.

Even a salesperson that you bring on board is not going to be an instant game changer, bringing a sales pipeline up to speed takes considerable time.
How's the sturdiness? I heard it can get just a little wobbly.
I don't know, I never tried.
It was said in another thread that these were done using development servers: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1371048

Edit: Oh he responded to you the last time, but I'll leave this here so others can see
Meetup.com just introduced a feature that lets people all over the world hold a meetup on the same day.

I did one here in Buenos Aires when I first got here and it's helped me get things done in this city and make great friends.

What do you think of the idea of doing one everywhere?
Try this thread from a year ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=554166

which links to this article: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legali...

Perhaps not an argument against, but certainly a 'reality' check argument against the "it's so obvious we should do it" mentality that seems to thrive in online forums.
Maybe that's an indicator that bad patents are being granted?
I think you'll find it is three words.
Most people only find out what's in the appstore after they've bought a phone.
I'm pretty sure modern garbage collectors don't have that "stop the world" behaviour that causes unresponsiveness. And tens of millions of J2ME-capable phones have been running garbage collectors for years. (And while J2ME has a reputation for slowness, that's mostly about startup time, and anyway it's largely due to bad coding rather than the runtime being inherently slow. Opera Mini and the J2ME version of Google Maps are both more responsive than many "native" apps.)
In line with this thought, Groupon uses "See Today's Deal": http://skitch.com/kadavy/dfkk8/the-daily-groupon-coupons-dis...
While that may be true in other areas, it may be difficult to get a job at one of the more well known ruby or rails shops without a GitHub account and community contributions.
Ask HN: Can young entrepreneurs with no coding experience launch a startup?
Here's my situation, briefly:

A few months ago, I watched customers deal with a widespread problem in what was my industry at that time.

I researched the idea fully for a week or so and found a few services that solved similar problems. I could only ever find one blog post (someone offering up the idea) with more or less the exact idea.

For the next few weeks, I mocked up the idea, wireframed the pages, and generally envisioned how this would work and refined the business model. I asked a few people with relevant industry experience for their suggestions, and made a few minor tweaks on the mock-ups. A dozen industry leaders have already pledged to me that, if I can deliver what I have mocked up, they will definitely be interested in a long-term relationship with my company.

This idea is nearly unique (and its proposed execution definitely has not been done before), but the technology required to execute on it is not particularly complicated.

I had hoped that in the next few months, I could familiarize myself with Ruby on Rails and code this thing myself. As I look ahead, though, I'm realizing that it would be a good idea to have someone on the team who is familiar with other technical aspects of the company - like handling the servers, the bugs, et cetera.

I would love to focus on business development, networking, sales, general admin tasks and marketing, since I have experience running my own (non-technical) businesses in the past. Unfortunately, young start-up founders all seem to be programmers who brought on gray-haired entrepreneurs.

I'm wondering where I should go from here.
>Please keep pro/anti drug legalization arguments elsewhere.

Please don't take this the wrong way, but your account is 49 days old...I'm not sure that you're at the "I get to tell people what sorts of discussions they're allowed to have" stage yet, especially not to people that have been here for almost three years.
just joined!
Comparing Entrepreneurship in US v Europe [Infographic]
Hangar: hot or not?
I enjoyed reading it.
I once asked a team leader, who had .net and PHP experience and was in the middle of a large Ruby On Rails project, what the benefits of Ruby and Ruby On Rails were. She could not think of a single one.

...
Oh please - get of your high horse. A simple down vote would have conveyed that, no need to get all high and mighty on me.
Not only do they distribute it, they profit from that distribution^. If they were just a "dumb pipe", like an ISP, then no, but they have an active hand in it.

(^ Not that profiting from it is a conflict with the GPL, it just reinforces their status as a distributor.)
TBH, I think 5$/issue is a bit steep. In Canada I currently pay 40$/yr for my print subscription and I know that an American Print subscription is 20$/yr, so the price difference is pretty substantial.

I will be keeping my print subscription until prices are more reasonable.
I'd say about 90% of the code can be cross platform; some things you'll have to implement seperately, such as the drawing library, since that doesn't work the same on each platform. FireBreath abstracts most of the differences, though. For example, it isn't a shim to let npapi plugins work on activex; it's a shim for both npapi and activex plugins, which means it's easier to write something in firebreath than it is to write it using npapi as well.

If you aren't doing any drawing, just network stuff and calculations, you can probably get by without writing any platform specific code.

- Taxilian (original author of FireBreath)
When that comes out and works, it will be sweet... and FireBreath will support it.

- Taxilian (original author of FireBreath)
DIY Electric Car Breaks World Record Going 624 Miles on One Charge
This is hilarious. I seriously had to check the address bar to see if I was reading the Onion.
It's vastly more meaningful than peoples anecdotal evidence.
Why did you pick him out of tons of "business guys looking for tech guy"?
So @ 10 minutes, do you think I should still do co-hosts?

Also...I did link to the stories, on the actual page with the podcast: http://ideatin.com/2010/05/ideatin-podcast-episode-1/ :)
Also a great project; nixysa and FireBreath have a core difference in approach, though; nixysa is basically a code generation tool to simplify creating npapi plugins.

FireBreath is a framework that abstracts npapi and activex (but could be extended to abstract other types of browsers as well, if there were reason and someone wanted to) to make it easy to write your own code that works in both places.
It helps call attention for contributors to Socknet, regardless of whether or not it finds use in Diaspora.
We have two other competitors (that I know of) who have a very similar offering (give or take) and all are at about the same stage (but the gap is widening).

The deals they have closed so far, are measurably better. (We even managed to get two biz owner that due to personal connections told us a bit more than fair about their dealings with one competitor).

So I am pretty certain where the weak spot is (and it was admitted to be so).

I am posting now because the competition is growing faster and widening the gap.

PS> Excellent comments and questions so far. I am reading the links and got some food for thought.
I actually got something similar off of eBay from China: $90+$30 for shipping. The thing is surely pos quality wise (slow [same specs as this one] and battery doesn't keep charge for long, screen/touch suck, plus some power management issues), but hey, it's $120 and I can actually develop something for Android and read books/browse net. I don't care even if it die tomorrow.

App store isn't an issue, as long as you can download software directly. Why even bother with some intermediary?
Fair enough: that kind of accusation has indeed a long history, harking back to the myths of Prometheus, Daedalus and Faust. But to regard hubris as “playing God” is, first, a modern perspective, and second, a secular one. After all, Prometheus did not in any sense “play God” (he was already divine, and Zeus himself gave him the role that he was deemed to have abused).

Yes, Prometheus was divine, but the point of the myth was not that he stole godly powers but that he gave them to men. But the myth is interesting because it all worked out pretty well for men (but badly for Prometheus), so Prometheus is rebellious to the gods but still a great benefactor.

The closest analogy in the Abrahamic religion is Adam and Eve, who again got godlike powers (the power to understand good and evil) from disobeying a god. Unlike the case of Prometheus this act of rebellion is seen as an extremely bad thing for which we are still being punished.

In the same tradition there's also the Tower of Babel, another story about how man attempts to become Godlike and gets smacked down by god for it. And the Greek tragedies are basically all about folks who hubristically claim to be better than the Gods and wind up suffering horrible fates because of it.

Anyway, human mythology is full of all sorts of stories about humans who try to claim powers of gods. Sometimes it ends well, usually it ends badly. Some stories are teaching us to be happy with what we've got while others are trying to explain why what we currently have sucks. Picking on Prometheus, Daedelus and Faust are lousy examples, I don't know why the author picked 'em.
I'll have a look. Thank you.
Same reason he wrote it in the first place: he's drafting off a trending topic to gain exposure and hopefully new developers.

Write one letter to the Diaspora team and, at best, they consider it. Put the letter out there (under the guise of being related to Diaspora to gain extra attention) and maybe a dozen teams consider it.
No we don't, we have:

Rewritten in Objective-C: OK

Translated from Flash to Objective-C by computer program: Not OK

It's like the difference between hiring a translator and using Google translate or hiring a typist versus using speech recognition.

[Edited for clarity: meant to change translated by hand to rewritten by intelligent human, and keep the second one the same].
This argument is weak as Google is not positioned or marketed for the purpose of downloading copyright material and those who use it for piracy are an extreme minority.

A search engine that is affiliate with Bit Torrent conjures up "ah i can download the latest movie, music,etc for free." Ask yourself how many times you used piratebay or isohunt to download the latest linux distro or ask the crowd the same thing. Unless these sites go back in time and start their grass roots marketing with download the latest linux and public domain materials they always will be thought of the way to get the latest copyrighted material for free and stick to the man. Though if they went that route you'd never would have heard of them.
Losing my Laptop Without Losing my Mind
Cool, welcome!
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