skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Same experience for me. Sad that corporate culture is so thoroughly fucked at so many companies, but the closer you get to HR, the more likely you are to hit some power tripping asshole that gets off on creating and enforcing arbitrary policies that treat high-talent and low-talent individuals alike.

In this world, you learn to get what you can, however you can, with as few people aware/involved as possible.
That government licensing will protect you from these better than the market is an untested assumption.

Actually, that isn't true.

Many building code laws (and by extension hotel laws requiring fire escape access etc) were enacted because of large scale urban fires (eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_fire_safety_legislat..., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Baltimore_Fire#Legacy).

In general, building codes and related safety regulations for hotels have strong scientific and engineering testing behind them.

It's true that these regulations are often imperfect. But it is also true that they have been tested and proven to be better than the absence of them.
Or improve the option that always exists: walking away.
You could always URL encode it: http://www.quora.com/Why-doesn%27t-Quora-use-PostgreSQL

That way everyone clicking on the link from the home page doesn't get taken to the 500 page.
I've done grunt work on some deals and seen multipliers in the 6-14X range. But the multiple was of EBITDA, not revenue.

If you talk in terms of revenue, multipliers can vary as wildy as companies' margins do. EBITDA (or one of its zillion variations) common-sizes the multiple.
I didn't really address that in the post. But, in short, fundraising, hiring, product feedback and PR successes can be significantly attributed to a member of the community helping us out. I'll try to write a post that provides more details.
A Very detailed pros and cons. Liked it.
Most of the large SaaS firms owe much of their early success to "bottom up technology adoption." For example: Salesforce, Webex, NetSuite, SugarCRM.
Where's Azure Table Storage?
Everywhere in California except San Francisco proper.
No!....thats my os/2 3d gameboy.
ie. skimp on commodities, not on talent
I wonder if this could be combined with UWB-like principles: you encrypt the clock at both ends and only look at the signal at certain timestamps.
Agree. If anything, you'll exercise your mind, learn a new skill, and can add it to your resume.

Learning how to program gives you a better sense of what it takes to build something. I personally believe that if you're in startups, you should at least be somewhat knowledgeable in the technologies used.
If anybody is looking for a challenge, find a O(1) solution to this problem.
This can be mitigated pretty well by a good library, EventMachine for example. It handles the evented complexities for you, all you need do is provide an event source and a callback.
If you think about it, this smells a lot like a recommendation engine in other domains, doesn't it?
Sure. But I don't think in this case the upstart has been gaining any traction.
That doesn't make literal sense. AirBnB is a middleman, but the enabling type just like Craigslist or PayPal or eBay or something.
ahhhh c'est koi ?
A few years ago, I wrote a commercial plugin for a product and later sold the IP to the developer of the product I plugged in to. I'm intentionally being as vague as possible to remain anonymous.

My plugin was on the market for about 9months. In that time, my revenue was in the $60k range. The sale price was around 6x the revenue. However, it was spread out over a few years of me being employed by the purchaser. Of course, I got a nice salary in addition to the purchase price.

One thing that made my situation interesting is that a competitor of the product I plugged in to was interested in me doing the same thing for their product. Once they got wind of the negotiations, they immediately made me an offer. It turned into a bidding war for my IP/company.

My observations from what you've described:

you will almost certainly be expected to work for the purchaser since it sounds like you are the sole developer. They are essentially buying your services and the IP. So don't give them a reason to be wary of you working for them.

On what to ask for: Unless you have revenue, there is no way to objectively quantify at least a minimum value of your IP. There is an art to negotiation that is beyond this post but you've already got them to admit that you will make them millions. I think that is an excellent start. The best negotiators are willing to walk away from the deal. Determine a minimum you want ahead of time and then be prepared to walk away if you don't get it.

If you just want out then act accordingly. Give them a price that you know will keep them interested.

In my case, it took several months between the initial exchange of interest and serious negotiations to begin. They first contacted me in January, An email with an offer price arrived out of nowhere in May.

What I would do differently:

I would have asked for an earn-out instead of a flat price. I didn't know about this until I talked to a few other entrepreneurs. Basically, you give up guaranteed money for a cut of the action from your IP. You're assuming part of the risk. Big company with big marketing budget drives your product to success and you get a cut. It's a very common thing in product acquisitions.

When the competitor made an offer, I disclosed the other company's offer. I should have let them make me an independent offer. Even though there was a bidding war, the price stayed pretty close to the initial offer by the first company.
Contact info:

1. Email: <my_user_name>@gmail.com

2. Twitter: @sbhackerspace

3. IRC: #sbhackerspace on FreeNode (PM me, I'm 'fraktil')

4. Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=132002656842113

5. Website, blog, mailing list, etc: coming soon
I did say that it wasn't a good comparison; however, thank you for clarifying exactly how horrible it was. How about moving on to the other paragraphs?

(Also: previous comment edited to incorporate exactly how terrible the comparison was. It was really more of a jumping-off point for the rest of my musings ...)
If you're developing things that would be useful for your startup (you're the lead developer, I have to assume you make a lot of decisions as to how to do things)... then I would think you need to at least discuss the issue with your partners/bosses/investors.

Your name should definitely be on the code, but the bigger question I think is - should theirs?
I'm confused. South is all about migrations...

"South brings migrations to Django applications."
-http://south.aeracode.org/docs/about.html
You know, in any of these cases that I presume you're discussing (the helicopter murdering civilians, etc), the US government is fully capable of releasing more videos or documents, if there were any, that would show this information in a different light. The fact that the government doesn't is, I think, sufficient to know that the information is safe to interpret as showing the most charitable possible interpretation.
If you won't be happy with $Well-Justified-Price + $Extra because you feel they may have offered higher, then either your $Well-Justified-Price or your $Extra is too low, since you obviously wouldn't be happy with that amount anyway. If you feel the real $Well-Justified-Price + $Extra is higher than what they'd pay, then obviously you're not going to be happy with any outcome, so why are you wasting your time on this deal? The whole point of $Well-Justified-Priceis that its a good amount that you would happily walk away with and $Extra is exactly that - an added bonus. If they would have paid higher, good for them, they've got a discount, but you just walked away with an amount you decided would make you happy PLUS an added bonus.

Don't worry that they might have offered more. Be happy. If you can't be happy with that amount, you did the find a price you'd be happy with part wrong.

(Obviously not directed at parent, but rather agreeing with parent)
Get out and meet people, call people, networking. Depends on what type of stuff you are building and who your typical client is, where you are, etc.

Just get out there and try and meet people who might be interested in your services, figure out what works for you, are you great at meeting at social events? could you walk into a business and talk the owner into re-doing their website? can you cold call and close sales? try, learn, improve, test, fail, fail, fail, succeed :)
I'm getting a plain page with "error 500" on it :S
That would be because you don't see the body of the loop.
Reposting my own answer here, maybe it will spark a discussion:

Suppose you have an ordered set, which you also want to modify by adding and removing elements. Further, you need ability to retain a reference to an element in such a way that later you can get a previous or next element. For example, a to-do list or set of paragraphs in a book.

First we should note that if you want to retain references to objects outside of the set itself, you will likely end up storing pointers in the array, rather than storing objects themselves. Otherwise you will not be able to insert into array - if objects are embedded into the array they will move during insertions and any pointers to them will become invalid. Same is true for array indexes.

Your first problem, as you have noted yourself, is insertion - linked list allows inserting in O(1), but an array would generally require O(n). This problem can be partially overcome - it is possible to create a data structure that gives array-like by-ordinal access interface where both reading and writing are, at worst, logarithmic.

Your second, and more severe problem is that given an element finding next element is O(n). If the set was not modified you could retain the index of the element as the reference instead of the pointer thus making find-next an O(1) operation, but as it is all you have is a pointer to the object itself and no way to determine its current index in the array other than by scanning the entire "array". This is an insurmountable problem for arrays - even if you can optimized insertions, there is nothing you can do to optimize find-next type operation.
If you use a mac check out http://macfreedom.com/ or http://anti-social.cc/ I use freedom every time I have work in front of me that I want solid time to complete and I can't trust myself not to get distracted down some rabbit hole. It sounds stupid at first but two things it does for you over just unplugging from the network is that 1) you can still communicate with your local network/VPN and 2) you can't get back online without restarting your machine.
Men's MBT Sport 2 Shoes Grey Sale at MBTShoesSale100.com
My first suggestion is to make sure that you have some type of portfolio even if it is small. In my experience a lot of web designers create their own brand around their name and have a site with their portfolio. I'd then make sure you have some decent business cards so that when you start attending local events you have something to leave with prospective customers.

In most decent sized cities there seem to be numerous networking and small business events that are usually free or have only a modest fee to attend. I recommend checking the local chamber of commerce as well as using Google to locate them. Sites like http://www.networkingphoenix.com/ in Phoenix have a lot of events where you can get out and meet small and large business owners.

If that isn’t your style there are numerous websites advertising the need for talent to do one off projects. The issue with many of these sites is they want a lot for a little. But if you need experience, want to build your portfolio and or don’t mind working cheap then this might be a good route to start.

From there it is up to you. Also remember as you start getting clients, make sure you give them the best possible service as over time they can become your best source of business. Referral business often generates the best possible customers.
There actually is a difference (although I'm not taking sides in that debate):

If you allow people to not be present at all, then some will turn this into a business and operate a real hotel room, 365 days a year. Operated like a cheap hotel. I can see why the government may want to regulate that.

An easy way to distinguish the above situation from legitimate friends staying over, is to ask for the owner to be present. Or couchsurfing. That tends to make it a more casual and better controlled environment. I can understand why the government may want to stay out of this.

My impression is that the real criteria should be how much the room is rented: if you have guests 300 days a year, you should be regulated. If it's 10 days, leave me alone. The problem is that it's probably hard to define, and may impose its own set of requirements (such as, everyone would have to keep a registry of all visitors, just to prove that they don't fall into the hotel category).
Something few with love for physics left in their hearts could fail to marvel at, once more.
This is a common mistake people make, I think. Just because an ecosystem is smaller does not mean it is inferior (or less practical). In fact, the opposite is routinely true.

Is it harder to find tutorials for PostgreSQL? Yeah, maybe. Is it harder to get high-quality advice and resources from subject matter experts? No; in fact, it's far easier. I have used PostgreSQL for many years and in all of them every question I've had has been answered quickly and properly by somebody in #postgres who knows way more about postgres and SQL than I'd ever even want to know.

And what about hires? When a million people "know" MySQL it takes a lot more effort to find somebody who actually does. There may be fewer contractors for PostgreSQL but they are practically by definition better than the average MySQL contractor.

unlike learning a programming language, with databases, the domain knowledge is harder to discover and more risky if you don't understand it

Exactly. So should you trust the ecosystem that relies on lazy, bandwagon developers for the majority of its market share, or the one that has been silently doing shit the right way for years? There may be a whole lot of really skilled MySQL admins out there (I guess there must be given how many huge sites go to extreme lengths to make MySQL work for them), but I can find you a handful of grossly overqualified PostgreSQL admins in no time. The same can't be said for the former.
Ask HN: Foursquare somehow surpasses Loopt
I have researching various mistakes and such that startups make, and in particular I have been looking at location-aware startups. I was recently looking at google trends for foursquare and loopt and noticed this: http://www.google.com/trends?q=foursquare+,+loopt&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=1 which implies that sometime around the beginning of this year foursquare must have made some sort of significant change, but I don't have a clue as to what. Do any of you guys know what I might be missing in understanding this? Thank you!
Is there life after debt? The age of easy credit and its aftermath
One of the major problems with modern society is this paranoia that everything on the news is true, and a good representation of the general population.

I have stayed in 100s of shared hostel rooms, never had a problem. I have heard stories, we all have heard stories, but they are so minor to be negligible. You are in more danger getting to the hostel/house than you are once you are there.

I suggest you actually get out more and experience people, share a room, it is a great way to stop your foolish attitude. If you have a car, then you are already way to cut off from the real world.
I'm not sure why you linked to the darwinports web site, it’s a domain squatting site, not at all linked to the original darwinports project, and I believe one of the reasons they changed the name. Even without this, darwinports, not macports, have ever (really) supported binary installs, which means you need a compiler (namely gcc) to get this LLVM package installed.
Here's some negotiation tips by a professional:
http://www.rdawson.com/articles.html

Good to read to get into the right frame of mind.
The computer history museum is worth visiting. They have an actual implementation of Babbage's Difference Engine No 2. It's a mechanical calculator that calculates up to 7th degree polynomials to 17 (IIRC) degrees of accuracy. Babbage didn't actually get it built during his life, but two have been made. The one in the museum will retire to Nathan Myhrvold's (sp?) living room at the end of this year. They actually run it for a couple calculations each day; I can't recommend seeing it enough.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_engine

Also, for the record, winter in SF is cold, at least for CA. Plan for lows in the 40s and highs in the high 60s.

Some of the hacker spaces down south, in the valley proper, might be fun too. Dunno. Depends what you want out of the vacation.

Also, I wouldn't go to Ocean beach. Too many junkies and too many needles. Rent a car and drive south along CA 1. It parallels the coast more or less and there are beaches along the road for at least an hour south.
No, while this is a wonderful analogy, I don't think this is actually a problem. It's more like assuming horses weigh 1000 kg --- wrong for all but the biggest draft horses, but a nice round number to work with.

For the level of analysis in the article, there's really no difference between a 4 core machine and a processor with a 4x clock speed. His point is that the threaded model makes the most sense when each request is CPU intensive, and the event model works best when the work is light but the delays are long. All that would change for a multi-core processor is the definition of when the works starts to be CPU 'intensive'.
Sometime, the government just take the regulation code from private sources, such as Underwriter Labs. In fact, UL sets the standard from building code, household checmical, and fire-fighting equipments, and more.

However, safety, like anything else is a tradeoff. There is no such thing as a perfectly safe building. Even if you were to make it totally safe, it would be too expensive to use or construct.

You want safety? Just how much are you willing to pay?
> "Does not really diminish my IQ"

Sorry, I meant it does not significantly diminish my IQ.

> How do you know is not the same thing with you.

First, I did not say I'm smarter when high. There was a study that shows that there is a small drop (~ 4 points) http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/04/22/text.iq/.

I also see my work when I am sober and it's fine.

The question is what needs to be optimized. At times (not all the time IMO and certainly not in the office), the benefit of exploring new options and increasing motivation of the task outweighs the slight drop in IQ.

> The test subjects would swear that they drive even better when drunk.

I did not swear I code better either. I take a different approach to solve the problem at hand, which leads to better results due to diversity in the problem solving process. I code sober much more often than when high. My code is also peer reviewed. It seems to work out just fine.

Sometimes you just have to loosen up. However you want to do that is up to you, as long as you use proper discretion if it is a controversial approach...
I think he means AirBnB...
What does a fire in a hotel say about short-term rentals, which have more to do with homes & apts than hotels? Do horrific club fires (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZx4i1TwZME) justify a ban on house parties?

To restate: one of the justifications for regulating landlords is the possibility that they may offer unsuitable, even unsafe housing, in desperate circumstances. But where's the evidence that this is happening in the short-term rental market?
What kind of soul-rot afflicts a man who can't say "What the documents circulated by WikiLeaks say isn't true anymore", but must say instead "The documents circulated by WikiLeaks do not reflect the current on-ground realities"?
The problem of actual unlicensed hotels - a set of rooms lived in by no one but short-term renters - is entirely different, and is the problem which should be removed by legislation. It's also the problem which many of the people who are against AirBnB and similar sites are thinking of; there is a world of difference between a group of tourists given free reign in an apartment and one or two tourists renting a bedroom from someone who is living in and present in the apartment. This difference is perhaps why so many of the people who have tried such services are in favor of it; they have been in the latter situation, which seemed quite pleasant to them and which was completely preferable to hotels (all of the stories I've heard of users of such services describe this situation). The people who are angry about it (outside of the hotel industry) without actually coming into contact with it (short-term renting of the adjacent apartment, with whatever results) are thinking of the first situation.

Dear god I read your entire post only to realize you entirely agree with the legislation that was just passed only you have no idea what the new law means.
Letting Go
If you live in California, check out the California Labor Code Section 2870 -
http://law.onecle.com/california/labor/2870.html

I'm not sure about other states
Shouldn't the included templating system be the one everyone uses?

Agreed. I think they know that this is a weakness. I'd expect it to improve over time. In a similar fashion to them addressing ifequal and ifnotequal in 1.2.

Capitalization or minor string manipulation in erb doesn't require one to write a template filter function somewhere else.

Personally I'd prefer defining it once somewhere. Then use the function everywhere. Even with the initial code cost.

I think this is from past bad experiences. I once "repaired" a million plus line of code enterprise app that had misused some open source code that did date and number coercion (similar to django.contrib.humanize but for ASP). Needless to say the code was a mess and nearly the same code had been mixed in all over the place. The template code, the backend business logic and the asp C# files. After a few days of regexing then testing then fixing then searching then repeating. And then dealing with all the edge and special cases - I'll take a simple defined template function. All that being said - my example is a gnarly enterprise example involving bad code monkeys. So take it with a grain of salt - it's likely that the story isn't applicable to a lot of people here. But still - lesson learned. In the future designers can request template improvements and I'll deliver.
That's why database abstraction is so nice. If I ever get sick of MySQL - or say, decided I didn't want to use Postgres - it's not hard to switch!
Carrots + Hummus = Awesome. I discovered that a few weeks ago.
Seconding #postgres as awesomely smart and helpful. Especially RhodiumToad, who always seems to be in there.
I did a few months ago, before the controversial Apache video. Still here. :)
I would point out that it's not so much "other big companies" as it is what we've learned from our own sucking.
The early to bed and early to rise paradigm works incredibly well for me - there is something about being up before sunrise that boosts my productivity.

I sleep 5 hours when I'm not working out and around 8 hours when I am; which means my sleeping hours are either [12 AM, 5 AM] or [10 AM, 6 AM].
First off thank you for the excellent post, this is exactly why I chose to post this here. Amazing advice compared to anywhere else. Second - In terms of "portfolio" - I am a college student, so I haven't had much of a chance to get a lot of work. Would you suggest making dummy/boilerplate websites with nice designs to start off my portfolio? Or is it generally better to save your portfolio for strictly work you've been paid for, etc?

Thank you for great advice so far, looking forward to more!