skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the Guardian article was especially insightful because Munson reveals an important reason why her husband "turned around":

"His sister got cancer and her husband had just left her and she had five children and she actually died last 4 July."

I know why his brother-in-law left his sister, but this event might make him more hesitant about leaving his own wife.
Bobbing as the Taxman Weaves
Why did you get into angel investing?

(also, do you talk to yourself often?)
As you predicted, I do think you're being unfair to her. Relationships and happiness are tricky things -- if happiness does not come from externalities, can you not control your own thoughts, construct your own internal reality, and be happy based on that? Likewise, aren't relationships defined by feelings, not external successes, so dealing with the other person in _any_ capacity defines the relationship, and therefore its success?

I oversimplify, but it's something to think about.

More to the point, what I read was a woman who heard a line influenced by society, and decided she wanted to deal with it in a way that would force her husband to decide whether he really meant that. My feelings are rarely so clearly defined that I can reduced them to a few sentences, and I'll often collapse them to a saying because it's accurate enough. Frustration is one of the hardest to pin down, and I don't think it's unreasonable of her to say, "I hear that you're unhappy, but I don't think I'm the cause." Of course, just saying this isn't productive, for exactly the reason you mentioned: you can't tell somebody "You're wrong" when they express their feelings.

So she did what she could -- she distanced herself from the turmoil, and she tried to let her husband figure out exactly what the problem was. If it truly was their marriage, he would grow distance, and the subsequent departure would be easier on him. My guess, which fits with the events, is that he found the distance didn't quell his frustration, and re-engaging with his family at his own pace actually brought him some happiness.

Relationships are so close to our emotional core that when something goes wrong, it shows up in them. Like failing at work will make us unhappy even after we go home, lacking fulfillment from our hobbies and career can appear to show up in a relationship. Good relationships recognize this, and can survive an event like the one described in the article.
You mean jail? Criminal negligence is going to be tough to prove at the executive level, this is not an 'Enron', but it might come to that still.
Someday you'll grow up.
Verbs!

Getter and setter methods on objects are like OK and Cancel buttons in dialogs. Just because it's uniform industry "best practice" doesn't make it not completely retarded and obscurantist.
Hi Reilly.

(Reilly used to be my boss in the 90s. Much later I asked him to be on the board of directors for delicious.)
Not really. It was after this event: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/19/arts/design/19rhizome.html and I wanted to go to a diner.
You'd be pushing it to make any reasonable gains with a volatile trading strategy via interactive brokers. They target more run of the mill day trading strategies that your average at-home trader would employ.
(Maslow’s.)

Yes, very true, and perhaps a great illustration of how we humans haven’t yet evolved quite enough to deal with the very different challenges the affluent nations deal with so soon after we as a species were struggling for survival.
Personally, I believe reliability is the most important factor in choosing a hosting provider.

Out of curiosity, why would you want to move from a host that is providing you just that? I understand price may also be a factor, but that is a rather large jump in resources, which leads me to believe it's overkill.
Fossil Trove Shows Diverse Creatures of Cambrian Did Not Disappear
Ha, I was starting to fill out obvious questions that nobody asked, then got embarassed and deleted it.

I wanted to try to figure out of I was going to be a professional investor someday. I discovered that the hardest part for me is saying "no" a whole lot.

Yes, I do talk to myself.
Hey, I know a really "easy" solution to this "problem" for Steve Jobs: organize media sites to selectively block ipad users.

It might not make the users happy but that hasn't bothered Jobs so far. With enough Apple fan boys, you can justify anything - flash would be just the start. It would be like the worst Microsoft behavior from the 90's but since Apple isn't a horizontal monopoly, it has fewer legal barriers to its behavior.
What's something a startup has done that most surprised you by working when you expected it not to work?
Actually, I don't see that many that are bad per se, but I don't understand or like everything I see.

Lots of bad entrepreneurs have problems that prevent me from actually seeing the pitch itself anyway.

I prefer to see prototypes, anyway. This keeps a LOT of crap out of the way.
* What is your favorite investment to date?

* Was delicious boot strapped?

* How do you feel about a publishing co (a la O'Reilly or PeepCode) as an investment?
I suspect that we are ALL reading our own perspectives into this story quite a bit, so I can't say that you're wrong. Where you see "refusing to engage with him emotionally", I see her simply declining to respond to his drama with counter-drama of her own. She had an insight that let her avoid bringing her own ego into his situation, thereby simplifying the path to a resolution.

As an aside, as someone who had a parent who made their own happiness into an ever-present concern for their children, I agree vehemently with the notion that it isn't age-appropriate to do that.
Have you tried Zathura (http://zathura.pwmt.org/) ? It's a pretty lightweight PDF viewer with vim-like controls.
"I'd like to make a thoughtful comment, but I'm struggling to get past the phrase 'age-appropriate'. As someone who has never been 'appropriate' to their chronological age in any respect, it always comes across as reductive, patronising and ultimately dehumanising. It seems to me to be the product of a worldview which sees children not as distinctive individuals with unique preferences and aptitudes, but as mere larvae passing through 'developmental stages'. I consider it an affront to the dignity of all children and my teeth are set on edge every time I hear it."

Do you have kids? Do you think a 4-year-old has "unique preferences" or feels de-humanized because he isn't given "ice cream" as a choice for dinner?

While your comment might be true of an adolescent, it is not true of all children as a category. There are very real and beneficial reasons for age-appropriate learning and guidance.
Samsung May Be ‘Uncatchable’ With $15.6 Billion Capex
Duplo - C/C++/Java Duplicate Source Code Block Finder
"Over the years the trade had produced occasional flashes of inspiration in which a writer—Daniel Defoe, Rebecca West, Joseph Mitchell, W. C. Heinz, John Hersey—took a turn at bringing to a true story the qualities of fiction."

I'm curious why the writer ignored George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway - because they ruined his thesis?
> favorite investment

They're all my favorites. I try not to do the ones I hate.

The ones that seemed very obvious to me on first conversation were Etsy, Weatherbill, and Twilio.

> delicious bootstrapped

I worked on it for two years before raising funding. But I did raise VC.

> a publishing co

Feels like a long slog. I'm not fond of content as a business.
I don't believe the man in this story had any idea what he wanted apart from escape, escape from her, his kids, his job, perhaps his mortality. He could be described as a victim of his emotions. I think she was right to identify this as negative, as hopelessness and directionless self destruction. That doesn't make it any less real for him or any less painful for everyone involved but it does make it possible to see her as a patient and dedicated support. We all go through trials. Sometimes those trials work to destroy our lives, relationships and the people we love. We would all be lucky to have someone stick around while we take them for grant and self-immolate for 6 months.

Regardless, he always had the option to leave. If he had a better plan, he'd have rolled with it. If he was self-actualizing greater destiny, I would agree with you but this guy sounds like he was under water.
can happen "unwittingly," despite a regulation requiring the first order placed to be the first order filled

You put quotes around "unwittingly" like you don't believe it. It really is unwittingly - the high frequency shop submits a bid at the same time as another place (or even afterwards), but the exchange fulfills the HF order first. See page 17 in http://sec.gov/comments/s7-02-10/s70210-129.pdf for how it occurs and page 18 for some real world examples.
It's important to note that for whatever definition of the word "shady" you're using, it is different than Madoff shady: Madoff's returns were fictitious, imagined from a series of hypothetical trades made in hindsight; these HF firms keep their assets in audited third-party broker accounts, so the returns are anything but fictitious.

What you are arguing is that because they are successful they must be shady, not that it is impossible to be successful and that therefore the claim must by shady.
"Wow, you've been busy! You've ranked a whole 13 statements. Why not take a break? You've got 77 statements to go, and there's no need to tire yourself out."

Holy fuck, had I seen this at the start I would never have bothered. Maybe this is why languages get bad reviews; people give up on marathon surveys.
Hmm,

So it doesn't bother you that this "investment" doesn't have any relation to building productive enterprises of any sort?

One might might think that the nastiness of 2008 would wake people up to the idea that markets can generate destructive speculation as well as constructive investment. But fixed ideas mostly resist reality.

And contrasting the NYSE profiteering to high frequency profiteering is kind of false argument. It's more a matter that deregulation has been a disaster and the situation cries for a modern version of re-regulation - except that the inmates are still well in control of the asylum.
34ish and you say you're a junior angel?

I guess that makes me a junior associate at best.
The point of raising funds is to hire people who can accelerate the growth of the business. $200k gets you a person or two, which doesn't do very much. So you find yourself raising again pretty much immediately. The fundraising process is a colossal waste of your time.

An entrepreneur going this route is not making good trade-offs.

In my experience, most of these companies fail.
Why do we need to rationalize this device? Didn't we all agree in January that the iPad is indeed a slick product, but serves really no purpose for the average hacker. Now it's out and you bought it anyway because you couldn't resist Apple of course. And your defending yourself with statements how much fun it is to play games or read news websites on it. Congratulations. RDF in action.
What's the most unexpected thing you've learned along the way?
I think in this context "I don't buy it" is closer to "I think you are misinterpreting your feelings" rather than invalidation.

With respect to her emotional distance, John Gray's book: "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus" has some good insight re Men's need for space and distance when things go bad. I think her actions were very sensible for a long term relationship.
And you picture the other traders physically on the NYSE as the bank manager in "A Wonderfull Life"?
> So it doesn't bother you that this "investment" doesn't have any relation to building productive enterprises of any sort?

As the article points out, these firms provide liquidity which makes trading faster and cheaper. Theoretically, more liquidity should also make it easier to move capital to the most profitable enterprises.
Startups don't generally tell me about their decisions often enough for me to be able to benchmark this, I think.
as always, Im not a lawyer.

It may vary where you are but in Australia if its reasonable for you to believe the employee has the authority to make such an agreement then its binding (everything else being equal). The employee's actual authority isn't relevant.

Otherwise people saying "oh, they didn't have the authority" becomes an instant way to wriggle out of any deal after the fact and contracts everywhere become worthless.

Side note: this is one of the big reasons why big companies are so strict in their rules about low ranking employees speaking to anyone within their premises or while wearing anything identifying you as employee. It suggests you are an agent of the company and thus speak for the company.

When I worked in a large supermarket chain many years ago all staff but store management were absolutely forbidden from speaking to anyone about pretty much anything because we were agents of the company and thus could be presumed to be speaking for the company.
Saying "no" is the hardest part. Entrepreneurs are by nature a persistent bunch.
Software algorithms already are a lot better than humans at technical analysis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_analysis) by almost any measure.

There is still some way until they are there in fundamental analysis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_analysis). I think there are some pretty good opportunities in automated fundamental analysis and trading, though. If I had the capital I'd build a trading bot which traded on the basis of automatic news analysis.
Not really.

I wish you'd do something bigger. You certainly have what it takes. I hope appointment reminder turns into that thing. (Also, ++ for using Twilio)
Uptimes are comparable in my experience.

Be sure to use an EBS-based root volume. http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/message.jspa?...

If you don't, you have to be extremely careful to avoid losing data.

If you have questions or concerns, don't expect service of the same level as slicehost or linode. AWS serve much bigger fish than you, folks using hundreds of instances. It's not a criticism of EC2; I still use them. Just be aware of the trade-offs. It's cheaper because there are certain things you don't get.
Tell HN: co-founders meetup free for software developers (Mountain View)
If you are a software developer interested in potentially joining a startup at the earliest stage possible, the co-founders meetup of silicon valley is free for you. And we provide good food and wine :-)

http://www.meetup.com/Co-Founders-Wanted-Meetup/calendar/12923450/
Well that brings up my other question, which I wrote and deleted: what's the median frequency with which you talk to startups you've invested in, and how does that change (in a given case) with time?
Even the things that academia studies that can't be entirely decoupled, such as TDD, I think can still be applied in practice. You just have to take your context into consideration when deciding if it's appropriate. What is your deadline? How skilled is your team? etc.
>callipygean

It's spelled wrong here.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/callipygian
I love the Canon 50mm 1.4. It's at the high end of the range, but (~ $400 I think) but still reasonable.
Couldn't that be done via one actual criminal prosecution? It seems like they're basically trying to charge him with 15 variations of the same crime, instead of just charging him with that crime once. I guess that's not uncommon, but still feels weird to me.
In a given trade, the violation of the price time rule may be inadvertent, but evidently the pattern that this happens is well known. So I put the word "unwittingly" in quotation marks, not to show exactly that I don't believe it, but to adopt the exact language that was quoted in this thread. And now I raise the question: if the trades that violate the price time rule cease, how different would the performance of the traders be? Does this known phenomenon of violating the regulation have a predictable effect on some kinds of trades that is different from faultlessly following the regulation?
Steve Blank is partially wrong about business plan competitions
I can't or won't negotiate terms, lead a round, syndicate a deal, or sit on a board.

So that makes me subordinate to people who do these things; they are therefore my senior.
I gave an Intro to Ruby class the other day, and made a point of emphasizing the idea of message passing. I also gave a quick intro to `method_missing`.

It pains me when people spend a fair amount of time coding Ruby, and then encounter metaprogamming and dynamic method invocation, and because of their wrong preconceptions they think it's deep, dark, super-genius hackery.

Unfortunately it gets clumsy to always say, "passes the message 'foo'" instead of "calls 'foo'", but if you can make the point early and toss in some reminders along the way the idea may stick.
What is your online privacy score?
I played tennis quite well in high school and college. I never tried to go pro. Does that mean the tennis teams failed?

I swam competitively in college. I didn't try for the olympics. Does that mean the swim team failed?

There are a lot of valuable lessons one can pull from a business plan competition even if you don't become a founder, or even if you never intend to become a founder.
This was a great article, thanks for sharing it. I'm a huge fan of twitter myself, so I can only imagine how awesome this bank will be. I wish him luck in his future endeavors.
What portion of your investments are outside of the bay area? (If you travel frequently to NYC, exclude that too. I'm interested in how much remote investing you do.)
This is going to be interesting. Sucky banking services are largely an American phenomenon.

My bank in Norway has no physical offices and conducts all of its services over the internet, phone or mail. There are (practically) no fees and the interest rates on its savings/checking accounts (there are interchangable, since there are no fees) are within 0.2% p.a. from the best that can be obtained anywhere in the country, regardless of capital amount. All funds are insured from bankruptcy through the national bank security fund. The young crowd almost never uses checks in Norway - all bills are paid online. The only problem with this system is speed and service - if you suddenly lose your credit/debit card, you will have a few days of worry while the bank sends you a new one. Identification can be complicated, since there isn't a person 15 minutes away that can physically talk to you and verify your identity.

All in all, I think this is very promising. Someone needs to pull American banking into the 21st century. This guy will have problems with legislation and bureucracy and huge competitors, though..count on that.
Not to mention totally unnecessary. Most people are just fine with cookies.
At this point, it looks like a consensus is emerging: The death of the general purpose computer is greatly exaggerated.

The iPad is a great tool for consuming information, but not so good at communications or creation. A month in, I've never heard of anyone doing serious work on an iPad despite Apple's efforts to shoehorn a full office suite into the thing.

However, people love it despite the limitations. The iPad's a device that's just plain fun, and that counts for a whole heck of a lot. Apple will probably sell millions of them, and it looks like they have a good shot at creating an enduring category.
Monitis Launches a New Plan to Help Universities Stay Green and Cut Costs
Monitis, the leading provider of the world’s greenest, all-in-one, hosted network and application monitoring suite, today announced The Academic Plan - a comprehensive, all-you-can-eat (or unlimited) package and pricing model for schools, colleges, and universities.

The new Academic Plan offers everything found in the traditional Monitis suite of tools, but also includes unlimited monitoring. So academic institutions, be they schools, colleges, or universities select one of 3 possible packages – Small, Medium or Large based on the number of servers they need monitored, and nothing else. It’s that simple.

Starting from just $248 per month, the Academic Plan, is a perfect offer for schools with even the tightest of budgets, as all added-value services are free – the number of parameters to monitor, the number of network devices, and even alerts including Live Voice and SMS alerts. As a result, educational institutions have the luxury of employing a single monitoring solution instead of the standard current mix of multiple open-source software solutions (e.g. Nagios, Zabbix, Zenos, Cacti), commercial software solutions (like Solarwinds, Whatsup Gold), and external end-user experience monitoring services (like Gomez, Keynote).

Given that Monitis operates on a SaaS model and is based in the Cloud, IT managers throughout Academia can avoid the cost, stress, hassles, and limitations of using traditional software-based monitoring tools. With Monitis there are no upfront license fees, no updates to manage, and no servers to maintain. Getting set-up and running with the complete suite takes only 5 minutes, and as Monitis offers the Industry’s most reliable notification system, users can rest easy knowing that they’ll be notified even if their system or network is completely down.

But in addition to all of the professional advantages Monitis offers, it is also the greenest monitoring solution available today. Because schools, colleges, and universities that use Monitis don’t have to buy and operate their own monitoring servers, they save massively on electricity bills and minimize their carbon footprint. Indeed, with the average server’s electricity bills running approximately US $1,050/year, academic institutions save more money on electricity bills than they will spend on Monitis’ services. The savings increase even more dramatically when the cost of acquiring and maintaining the server are included, as well.

Said Monitis’ Founder and CEO, Hovhannes Avoyan, “For schools, colleges, and universities around the world, Monitis’ Academic Pricing plan is a no-brainer. Take the world’s leading-edge monitoring technology, wrap it in a pricing plan with a TCO that’s even lower than open-source systems like Nagios or Cacti, and then factor in the carbon footprint reductions, and Monitis has an offer for Academia that is truly unbeatable.” See more at http://portal.monitis.com/index.php/monitis-for-education
If we are going to shift responsibility from attackers to the attacked, there needs to be a clear and reasonable way for security non-experts to ensure that they are doing their due diligence, and for non-experts in the legal system to be confident that they aren't.

For now, any clown can come along and tell someone that they are secure, and another clown can verify that the first clown is an official certified non-clown. It may be perfectly obvious to you that these people are incompetent, but to the non-expert it ultimately comes down to your word vs theirs. Even the clowns may not have an objective way of knowing that they are clowns.

Without an authoritative standard that provides a root of trust to non-experts, everything falls apart. That standard requires consensus, which requires a critical mass of competent experts, which requires the state of the art to keep up with demand and change, which is not going to happen in the field of security any time soon because there is too much demand, too much change, and it's just too damn hard.
They typically stop talking to me after the next investment (usually, when they have a Board of Directors they are responsible to)

Most startups do not update the non-board investors much.

I am on IM most of the time. There is a "Founders" section in my buddylist.