skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Attorneys and accountants have a primary function of limiting and mitigating risk. Entrepreneurs by definition are willing to deal risk and are much more comfortable with putting their balls on the chopping block.

Be stupid? No. There are a few great accountants and lawyers worth their salt. Be wise, but remember it's your damn company, you've put the sweat in, and you should be calling the shots. Don't be a marionette for your counsel.
There is the hacker news spreadsheet: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AlD_6iEb8Ed9dGs3clVJ...

oDesk has a reasonable number of qualified people

Guru/Rentacoder seem saturated with low bidding "fail 3 times before you get a success" types.

Additionally, the Basecamp people have a site with samples (but the name escapes me).
Don't keep yourself DRY; be REAL instead
Well for 5M, you might be able to buy a nice farm and some machine guns? Perhaps even pay workers for the farm for a couple of years?
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Star-sizes.jpg - Scale of celestial objects.
This piece makes a similar argument with a helpful example:

http://factore.ca/on-the-floor/29-going-to-the-source-of-ope...
Not updated configuration options though. Core i series not available yet (for the ultra thin ones)
I'm pretty sure that doesn't do what I was asked to do.
One might quibble that the long term outlook of an oil company are perhaps not the best.

Of course, they've got the alternative energy division, which had $5 billion in sales in 2008. Pity it operated at a net loss, costing BP one and a quarter billion dollars.
um... push email?
Seth Godin posted a killer idea on his blog (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/05/ipad-killer-...) and we have been thinking of building it. We would love a small angel investor =) Email is in my profile if you are interested.
This video really really made me lose some faith in Zuck. I'm sorry, but if you really were passionate about people's privacy, you wouldn't sound like you were reading a pre-written script about it.

What they (he) needs to do is publicly apologize (and not just simply vocalize a script) to the users.
Many of my friends whose jobs are associated with intense, abstract thinking (professors, researchers) tend to "not have time" for much websurfing. Interesting how they may have inadvertently protected their brains this way.
The key is to create a cash flow with your windfall. Something that will sustain you permanently. There are many ways to do this. You may want to allocate a chunk (say 20%) to use in high risk investments but the rest should go into rental properties, or cash flow type businesses.
I really liked hearing about these niche software companies. I've always this thought in the back of my mind that there might be money to be made building niche software because... well no one writes it.

Although, I suspect thinking about it more, it might be developed by people who are selling something else (like the furnance HW company making software for gas power installation companies).
That screwdriver looks like a hammer...
um... courier-imapd?

Why should I have to pay an extra fee to apple (mobile me) or microsoft (exchange) in order to get basic functionality?
High-End Call Girls :-)
This is probably the least likely scenario. MSFT is still working on making functional x64 builds of Visual Studio. Even VS2010 is 32-bit. See http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ricom/archive/2009/06/10/visual-stud... for details.
Humm I'm not sure what the actual rumor is.. VS 2010 for the Mac or just the ability to dev for the iPhone or the iPad using VS on Windows?

From the technical both would be possible but I guess there would be some effort required to do either of these:

- VS on a Mac: VS 2010 uses WPF for the gui. Therefore it would have to run on a Mac. I guess the .net platform probably already runs on a Mac (there is Silverlight for a Mac) and since WPF uses Direct-X they would need to hook it up with OpenGL. However since VS is huge this would take a lot of effort I guess, so rather unlikely.

- The second rumor, that the VS on Windows would be able to produce iPad/Phone apps seems easier to do from a technical perspective, since they could use Clang/LLVM. But I don't really see the point here: There are more then enough people developing for the iPhone/iPad and this would probably hurt Microsofts Windows Mobile plans.. as well as Apples Mac sales..

So it's a rumor - that's all probably complete BS. We will see..
I guess I'm just a social leper or something, but I don't have this problem. Nor do most of the people I know who aren't professional networkers. I have something in the neighborhood of 150 "friends" on FB. Only about 30 or so of them post with any regularity.

If you are "friends" with ever person you ever meet, yeah, this will be a problem for you. On the other hand, if you limit your "friends" to people you would actually make a point to hang out with in person when you're in the same place, it doesn't seem to be an issue.

In other words, this isn't Facebook's problem, it's Cringely's problem.
I've always had this idea in my mind that the 'legendary failure rate of IT projects' is best explained in terms of an exponential increase in points of failure (or even just points of activity) when you deal with computer systems. Are there any famous papers that flesh out this idea? Anyone?
If you spend $100M buying back stock at the top of the market and then the next year, the bubble pops and your stock is down 50% was that really good capital allocation?

For every dollar you spent, you have effectively lost 50 cents. Sears admitted as much back in 2007 when they were buying back stock at $180 only to watch it drop to $90 a few months later. Remember, the idea with buybacks is to reduce overall share count so that you boost EPS and in turn your share price.

The amount you can retire might double if you simply wait out a bubble period. That's why dividends and buybacks need to be looked at relative to where the stock valuation is. When your stock is trading at a peak valuation, if you want to release value to shareholders, you are much better off using a dividend than a buyback.
IPhone vulnerability leaves your data wide open, even when using a PIN
Your first 3 paragraphs are about screen rotation, which is something already fixed with a hardware rotation lock on the iPad.

Email syncing is pretty straightforward, push the button to sync.

Most of your complaints seem pretty benign if you ask me.
queue Fox News to say that Obama should have insisted that this be done 4 weeks ago.
If this story in WSJ is proves accurate, BP has a lot of culpability.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870471700457526...
well, "long term" as in next few years, not 50 years.
By default, Facebook limits the Live Feed to show only posts from people it thinks you care about to limit overload. I assume few people change this, but Cringely has. Click "Edit Options" at the bottom of the Live Feed.
Did you read the article, or just the headline? Your post looks like "just the headline".
Are you saying that some people couldn't do the problem, but could actually read that Assembly?
Whose fault is it then if a lawyer impedes progress on an important deal? In my opinion, the fault lies with the business side. Lawyers provide a service - just like consultants. You wouldn't let a consultant run your business, so what's up with placing all the blaim on lawyers if deals get stuck? It's the business side's fault for not properly managing their lawyer and not telling him what exactly he is there for.

I'm pretty sure that's exactly what the author is suggesting. For example, notice things like,

"When I was a younger entrepreneur my answer would have been, “Ok. See if you can get us better terms. Call me when you’re done.” This time I said, “Make a list of the issues in bullet form, send them to me and I’ll get back to you.”"

My interpretation was that he is saying, "don't let your lawyer run your company strategy, that's your job", and this is fundamentally what you are saying as well (though with different focus).
This was my sentiment. I've been asked (and succeeded, presumably so do other people) to write pseudocode to solve more complicated problems than this on a whiteboard, in an interview.

Maybe this seems harder to people unaccustomed to C. I don't know. It seems like it would make sense to aim just a little higher, though. I recognize that it has to be a small enough that people won't be put off by it, but most people will be willing to invest the fifteen minutes necessary to solve a mildly complicated problem.
Oh, so that's a disadvantage for VP8 against h264 on current cards. I wonder how well such a decoding can perform implemented on OpenCL/CUDA vs the pure "supported" version..
These aren't specific problems that I think I would have with an iPad, they're examples of what I feel is Apple's philosophy on dealing with their customers.

Basically "We're right, we don't care about your problems, piss off."

Why can't I get the same sort of rotation lock for my iPhone? (well, I can, but it was something that was made by the community and something that will void my iPhone's warranty [which is funny because I am literally on hold right now with the apple store to make another appointment with the "genius bar" because the phone is currently only displaying a white screen])
Honestly, I'm a bit surprised by the responses in this thread. The rumour might be true or false but that's not what I find surprising.

Are there technical problems regarding the rumour? There are, certainly. However, we developers know that technical problems can be solved and Apple and Microsoft certainly have the resources to do so.

Are there business issues? Is this an unexpected move? Certainly, it is. But Apple has a history of unexpected business moves and business innovation, as does Microsoft even if it is uncool to acknowledge that.

Even if the rumour is false (I don't know) I don't find it unbelievable at all, because (a) it makes sense (b) this move would be both typically "Apple" and typically "Microsoft", if you look at the history of these companies. Hell, Microsoft started as a programming tool company.
a scramjet will only _ever_ be able to operate at high speeds. The compression of intake air for combustion is achieved by the forward velocity of the engine itself (the engine has no moving parts) unlike a normal jet engine which uses a fan to compress the intake.

Any scramjet, current or future, will require some combination of other engines in order to accelerate the aircraft to a velocity at which the scramjet becomes self-sustaining (typically 3000+ mph I think).

Edit: needless to say, a stable self-sustaining scramjet is an INSANELY hard fluid dynamics problem.
Speed is not really the issue here: the X-15 was a hell of a lot faster 40 years ago. As usual the media misses the point due to their own ignorance.

There are two news-worthy items here:

1. The ramjet/scramjet engine. (No moving parts)

2. The lack of a test pilot.

This is what makes this test significant.
So... Is this one reporter tossing his speculation on top of another reporter's speculation? And now leading to us speculating about his speculation??

I'm honestly amazed we are falling for this. It's exactly the same thing I see every holiday season at the grocery-store checkout: "Psychic reveals which star will die of a drug overdose this year, who is going to get married, and why a giant earthquake is going to flatten Toronto." It's a simple game that delights the rubes. Make a lot of guesses, take credit for the ones you got right last year, and hand wave the ones that didn't come true.

How is this any different?

p.s. Here's a suggestion: Create a poll asking HNers to vote on which wild-assed-guess is going to come true and keep all the talk of vapourware in one place!
I suppose if one thought both a) it isn't really so bad and b) the government is going to deliver a (self-)righteous spanking to them and spook other investors, one could buy call options for next year.
"A scramjet is a type of jet engine designed to operate at the speeds of rockets. Its main difference from a rocket is that it collects air from the atmosphere to burn its fuel rather than carrying an oxidizing substance on board. More conventional jets (turbojets, turbofans, and ramjets) share this characteristic but are unsuitable for the high speeds at which scramjets can operate." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramjet#Simple_description

So there is a difference between a scramjet and a rocket, beyond the speed that it travels.
Both the US and Russia have had that ability since the 1950's. It's called the ICBM.
> Foreign learners shouldn't worry about proper English the way native speakers do.

Why not? Positive action? As a foreign learner, I don't want to be judged by lower standards. That would label me as "the French man"[1]. That would be a form of exclusion. That would lose me credibility.

Moreover, I am not judged by lower standards. In most contexts, people don't even know that I'm not native. They will judge me by natives' standards like I do you.

The catch is, I am not a native speaker. So, the only way to catch up is to worry more than native speakers. So I should. So I do.

[1] I once was told that unlike the Merovingian, Lambert seldom have a French accent, if at all. That he was upset when he was asked to fake it.
The analytical training a lawyer receives could be invaluable to a startup if that lawyer can break out of his extreme risk aversion.

In my experience, a good lawyer will truly impress you with his ability to think through a problem, but might surprise you with his ultimate conclusion. Virtually any risk makes him hesitant, irrespective of the potential return for taking that risk.
Sales figures are not comparable, unless you know how many people have laptops and how they use it.

To respond to the reactions though: What are their reactions really? Do they want iPad, or do they want an easy to use touchscreen device. Do they have any computer already, or is it their first? (I think we know the answer to that) Essentially - do they really want a specialised device for each of their activities and as which point will they say "that's enough - I just want something that integrates my N devices, like those old laptops".

I think people would buy a "laptopised" (as in - general purpose with full-featured modernised windows for example) dockable version of iPad and use it as their main computer in many cases. Not sure if that's what Apple wants - because now you can have both macbook and the ipad and ...
Should options at startups vest over six years?
The argument made by the post is that six years is the average time at which startups see an exit and so the options should have the same schedule to keep the employees. What are your thoughts?
I completely degree with your assessment of the facts.

The debugger is GDB. This is not hard to integrate with on windows, as it already is integrated with on windows.

The compiler is gcc. Objective-C for gcc already exists on windows. Additionally, several people (Appcelerator, Adobe, Corona, Unity3d) have written machine code compliant compilers, I think Microsoft could likely produce one in a small number of weeks if they were being illogical about gcc.

Additionally, Microsoft has pretty much continually shipped gcc for the last 15 years or so depending on the products they were selling in the windows/unix integration sphere (and OS2 tools as well).

You don't need to port all the UIKit/CoreFoundation libraries over, just the simulated versions, which already run on x86. I'm pretty sure that could be done in a reasonable timespan, probably 3-4 months at the most. The rest are cross compiled for the device, and cross compiling is largely the same no matter what your host platform is.

There is 0 chance Silverlight is in any way involved as an implementation platform for general purpose use (but the iPhone simulator may have been ported using it). The entire point of the 3.1.1 language was to tie everyone to C, C++ and Objective-C.
I'm using and loving www.solvate.com -- think odesk or elance, but curated by people who know what they're doing

Another curated experience! I think this is a key idea. Raw web experiences either suck or will degenerate to that point over time. A lot of websites that succeed do so by utilizing knowledgeable crowd sourced curation.

A key reason why the iTunes App Store sucks, is because their curation is clueless!
There is already lots of good general advice here, so I'll give you some very _specific_ advice: place a few million with Mohnish Pabrai ( http://www.pabraifunds.com/ , though you'll need to contact them as an accredited investor before you get access to the website). I spent a lot of time researching him and his way of working, and have not regretted it. Long term, Buffett-like approach, very sensible and fair.
I think android tablets will have a problem of having non-standard interfaces. There are already point of sale machines using the iphone because all iphones have the exact same bottom connector so it makes it fairly standard to interface across. All android devices have different ways of hooking up to -- I don't know why device manufacturers always like reinventing the wheel when it comes to hardware interfaces. I already own a few dozen different phone chargers at home, the only one that hasn't changed is the iphone.
When they carry 100% of their own fuel. This one gets oxygen from the atmosphere.
MongoDB: Migration from Mysql at Wordnik
Good point. In the article I also point out that you should not be reading code passively. You should be running the tests, executing the code, breaking stuff, and trying to fix it.
Cognitive dissonance is not to be underestimated in these things.
Palm webOS Designer Matias Duarte Joining Google
I think this article has convinced me that I should learn Perl. Looks bloody useful for shell scripts, indeed ("a better awk" is the phrasing I've heard).
I agree with all of that.

Part of the question is whether cyber activities are domestic in nature or foreign. While it might seem like a moot point to folks from other countries, we make a distinction about which agencies can do what and where. There needs to be some thinking about how an actual cyber war would happen. Would Air Force personnel physically take out internet backbones located inside the Continental U.S.? Would they serve search warrants? If not, would they direct the FBI to do so? Can they detain or investigate people?

We focus on the logical structure of a cyber-attack: computers, code, vectors, etc. But there a are a lot of physical components as well, and they can be located anywhere.

I completely agree that the AF is best of all the services to do this. If anything, the eventual solution should probably end up as an equal to DoD and not as a subordinate -- this subject area is just a weird duck when it comes to constitutional law. I just don't think taking the idea of a command and applying it here makes much sense. Sounds like the old "I have the solution, what is your problem" scenario.

And I can't get into your second point without becoming uncomfortable. Yes, we're not talking some kind of loose collaboration. But there's a long way from simple collaboration with industry to having a GS-12 potentially decide the fate of billions of dollars of e-commerce. The career track here does not match at all with the other services.

Or to put this in a personal story, I knew a guy who worked with very sensitive information for the Navy back in the day. He had a PhD from MIT and never wore a Navy uniform. He showed up to work everyday in sandals and Bermuda shorts. While he was incredibly effective for the Navy, he also did not fit into the traditional roles at DoD whatsoever. They had an inspection and he was supposed to have a uniform. He had no idea what a uniform looked like or how to wear one, and it was quite an adventure making it all happen on time. All of the paperwork and procedures the Navy required made absolutely no sense to him -- so he had other people take care of it.

Now you can get away with this for a while in small isolated units where the rest of the organization can "cover" for them, but it's another thing entirely if 90% of the guys doing the work don't fit into the cookie-cutter mold they are supposed to.

An organization structured to hone young people into super responsible war-fighting roles, doing so in ways it has learned in wars since Sparta, is going to have a lot of problems with the people, personalities, and experiences necessary to fulfill this particular mission. In my opinion.

EDIT: Or to put this in terms of my original joke, which was meant to be insightful, I'm not so sure that an organization dedicated to cyber warfare needs to be part of the armed forces.
For extra performance, use strchr to find the first char_to_remove.

/* Find the first character to remove */
/* This doubles the performance when there are no
remove characters, I assume because it uses a
builtin and because I don't do unneeded writes. */
src = strchr(z_terminated, char_to_remove);
if (src == NULL)
return;

/* src is the position in the old string, with
the possible characters to remove.
dest is the end position of the new string,
where non-removed characters are added */
dest = src++;

for (;;) {
/* Skip additional remove characters */
while (*src == char_to_remove)
src++;

/* Copy (including copying the terminal NUL) */
if (! (*dest++ = *src++)) {
/* copied a NUL - end of string */
break;
}
}
The instructors using our tool have been very vocal, and we're absolutely thrilled about that. However, we haven't heard too much from our fellow hackers or our instructor's students. If you've got a minute or two to spare, please let us know what you think.
I rather guess that he wanted high quality at bargain rates. The ones without 5 stars are harder to find, but clearly exist, and are willing to give a discount so they can establish a rep.
Virtualization could work, but Apple would have to build in support for it (versus the current approach of running x86 versions of the iPhone apps/frameworks).
Just wondering (I don't know much about OS X / iPhone development), why is it necessary to port it to x64? Surely OS X can execute 32 bit apps, just like Windows x64?
FDIC insures up to 250k. If you want to park it there -- go ahead.

Short term CD ladders (so you always have some money free if you need it but most of it is actively earning interest) seem like a good option as well.
Note to self : don't take anyone who makes throwaway comments about the "liberal media" seriously.

It didn't add to his argument at all, and subtracted by implying that he's doing this more as an "f you" to liberals than out of any rational thought process.

EDIT: /me watches the downvotes prove his point about how some people's thought process can be entirely hijacked. Yes guys, the apparent devastation of the Gulf is entirely a product of liberal propaganda -- things are actually perfectly fine.
Maybe it should be something like this:

Founders: 5x the salary they could have expected in a job over the same period they worked at the startup, after taking off any monetary investment they put in (+ interest) and adding any salary earned.

e.g. $60k * 2 years * 5 = $600k for a successful exit per founder.

Investors: 5x their investment
That was before GCC switched to GPLv3. However, the point is moot as someone else mentioned Clang, which I could see MS shipping. I did forget about SFU though, good point.
when they are cash flow positive and the point where they are actually profitable is in the foreseeable future and can be calculated.
that was a rocket engine though. this is air-breathing.
Microsoft already ships cross-compilers (for ARM, for example) with VS. And Microsoft already ships dev tools for mobile platforms with VS (including mobile device emulators, etc.). Moreover, MonoTouch showed that this sort of thing (developing iPhone apps in C#, for example) is eminently possible.

From a technical perspective there are no serious roadblocks.

Now, whether or not this is actual news and not completely unsubstantiated rumor is an entirely different question.