skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't imagine there's a noticeable speed difference between the two, but .end() is more about avoiding code duplication than speeding things up. If you don't like it, you can use a variable instead:

var entries = $('div.entry').css('border', '1px solid black');

entries.find('a').css('color', 'red');

entries.find('p').addClass('p-inside-entry');

I was initially pretty skeptical about chaining - I didn't find it easy to read, and I was worried that it would mean bugs in the middle of a chain were hard to spot. In practice I've found that these concerns were unfounded - chaining is perfectly readable once you get used to it (provided you don't go too crazy) and it's trivial to split a chain in to separate chunks if you need to debug it.
"The smaller the niche, the lower the bar to success."

And the smaller the success. Careful how small you go. Avoiding competitors is kind of admitting, "I can't build a competitive product, so I'll build a crappy one for people who don't have any alternatives." You may wow your target audience, because no one has ever paid any attention to them, but that doesn't mean you've built a successful business.

An old oil field and platform manager once said to me (after he'd been doing water table research work for municipalities for a few years), "You're going to bust your ass no matter what. You might as well bust your ass for $10 million as for $10 thousand."

Y'all can take all the 10 thousand dollar markets you want...I'll be over here working on cracking a billion dollar (and growing) market. I might not come out on top of the heap...but even second place is going to be a pretty penny.
Digg makes official its adoption of a 'semantic Web' standard
This is actually not advice but something I have learned the hard way.

It's not that the situation is bad, it's what you make of it.
Ask YC: Do young people care about a nice visual designed websites?
Hi,
I am about to launch a new site addressed mainly to teenagers. As I like nice visual "look and feel" sites, I usually spend lot of time on this issue, compared with i.e. programming, etc. This effort usually ends up delaying an almost ready to launch site (from the development point of view).

Do you think that nice visual designed sites are appreciated by most people (specially young people) or it is a secondary issue?.

I am asking this question because I am starting to think that nice designs are only appreciated by designers and not for the average user.
thanks for the support benn.
Joomla - The Changing Face of Web Development 
Joomla is an extremely popular open source content management system available on the World Wide Web for free. A number of online businesses are using it to develop their websites and get content published on a frequent basis.
Also on the topics of "technology and its impact on society", Mark Pesce can be very insightful. His video entitled "Piracy is good" made the rounds here awhile back, and the rest of his work ranges from insightful dangerously-close-to-the-brink-of-sanity, but all in a very fun way.

http://www.markpesce.com/
Morality comes from living and the way you live, not the other way around. Morality is just one of the tools we use to live better. It's definitely not something to judge how well we live.
I have outsource one project to india, I don't recommend it at all unless you get a project contract and the company has presence and a project manager where you live.

If you decide to outsource, be sure to make all the legal work well (nda's, work contracts) and bind the payment to the delivery of the project.

ps. I too think you were screwed, with that salary and equity it seems that you are her wallet, not emplyer or at least partner.
I'm a borderline young person, so I guess I can comment. Good aesthetics and good content seem circular. If a site looks good, I'm probably more inclined to look around, bookmark it, or contribute to the content. Conversely, if the content's good on its own, that might give it the popularity that spurs some visual improvement. A lot of popular sites weren't particularly pretty when they launched/grew (take Facebook), and some still aren't. But if it's a user-driven site, people might be less inclined to contribute information or come back in the first place if its ugly. So, I generally try not to separate the two in my own work. Form and function follow each other around.
in a world that most people strive for more important stuff like their health and some food I wouldn't say fun is the reason they don't engage into creating something novel, although some go broke just for pursuing their passions.
Oh and I didn't elaborate why the india is not a good deal, basically the culture is totally different: They don't tell you if things are not going well (they keep saying everything is okay while timetables delay and nothing is delivered) and the quality is not there unless you can keep a close eye on the code and understand how to check the quality of code.

just my 2 euro cents.
rms, why do you think jfornear will need to recode? (S)he hasn't signed over the copyright, and there is no mention of it having been discussed in the verbal agreement. And the bulk of it was copy and pasted. The 'customers' cannot copyright the idea, although they may have explicitly stated that part of the discussion consisted of trade secrets.

This is rather different from the Facebook case, where there was pre-existing code when Zuckerberg was engaged.

If the father really thinks it's a valuable proposition, it's in his interest to clean up the intellectual property situation sooner rather than later. I'd have a friendly word with them to say you think the whole project is much more likely to succeed if you've got equity as well. Once you've got an agreement on terms that you all feel are fair, that's the time to get the lawyers to put it into writing.

If they really want to get all legalistic on you, first think whether you want to be in business with them, second you could suggest that they pay your costs to hire your own lawyer.
If you're going to be heading in to any kind of adversarial situation involving contracts, then you're probably already outmatched; your roommate will go to his dad, and then whether you've drawn up your own contract or purchased one or consulted with an attorney of your own, you'll still be staring down the barrel of a lawyer whose son is involved. Lawyers love nothing more than billable hours, except presumably your roommate will getting a pretty healthy chunk of them for free.

So, I don't think you can make this work out.

But, if you wanted to try anyway, I'd suggest drawing up your own contract as a counter-offer. They aren't hard to write, and they don't have to be long. They just have to describe, in very plain language, what work you'll perform, what you expect to receive in return, and what to do if things don't work out.
Shortest summary of the release of Arc and the Lisp world's reaction
Installing Xen On An Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) Server From The Ubuntu Repositories
I was sitting in a coffee shop one day with a friend in Chicago, and a very intoxicated young hispanic man stumbled up to us, put his hands on our table, leaned over and gave me a smell of his breath that I still remember. Then he looked me in the eye, moved his finger within inches of my face and told me this: Never, never, ever date a Cuban woman.

To this day I've taken his advice. He seemed like he knew what he was talking about.
I love good design, but I've noticed recently that many people don't care that much. The company I'm freelancing for keeps buying programs which look like they were designed by a monkey (eg, clipart icons, garish colours, poor alignment of elements, graphics literally done in MS Paint) and nobody except me seems to give a damn. If your product is a good one, don't sweat the design too much. If people use it and like it, you can enhance the design later.
Good design and good user-interface. Nothing is more annoying than sites with awesome design but bad UI...
I had some problem intially getting the question posted here. The second post asks a similar question but slight variation.
I am really intersted in this at the moment so sorry if this seems to be a double posting. Thanks.
To read the book "How to be a graphic designer wihtout losing your soul", lot's of great advice there, even for non-designers
Visual design is a key, integral part of "look and feel" and usability. I would argue that even if you ask your users and they tell you they don't care about the aesthetics, they actually are influenced at some level by them. People (including me) are more likely to continue to use and contribute to a well-designed and attractive site.
Never follow self-referencing advices.
As the article says, I don't know if you could call this 'hacking' as such.
I wonder if it would be possible to use a program to detect animated images likely to trigger epilepsy, and block them?
Generous, but fatal. From the sound of it she was not a good candidate to be a startup cofounder. Better to give 50% to someone who's going to be as passionate as you than 1% to someone who's not.

Daniel
I worked in a few corporates and they all seem to favour .Net (for obvious MS support/marketing/mgt related reasons) but most of the solutions seemed to be okay.

Also I notice a trend that if you want to sell to corporates/companies they prefer .Net solutions as it ties in better with what they use (most business still uses MS, like it or not) and are more reluctant to go with opensource based solutions.

What do you think?
I think this situation would work out fine if it weren't for the unknown group members -- it seems likely that the OP and his friend with the lawyer dad are on good enough terms to make it work. I get the impression that the other group members don't really care about the project, because they aren't putting up the money to hire the OP. But if the project becomes successful, they could truthfully claim that they were involved with the project from the start.

It doesn't sound like anyone wants to be overly legalistic; it sounds like someone's father is an aggressive lawyer type that saw an opportunity to negotiate the best possible terms. The OP and his partners need to draft some type of agreement. I don't think there is any need to involve lawyers immediately, wait until you incorporate. For now, just get something on paper you all agree with. Send it to friend's lawyer dad to legalize if you so desire. Get a free corporate registration and registered agent from him if you can. Only a Delaware C corp.
This is something I have been struggling with too. I would love to make a useful web app that businesses would pay for, but all my ideas are something to do with software development, as that is all I know ...

I do try to speak to people in other industries from time to time to get ideas, but have got none so far :(

All we need is a 'social site' that non IT types can post their frustrations with the tools of their trade on to give us ideas - only problem is how we get non IT types to use it :-)
My concern isn't really with it causing bugs in my code; it's more with trying to decipher other people's code and making their lives easier when they have to read mine. I was skeptical about chaining at first too, but it all seems nice except for .end().

The speed question is because I don't know how jQuery actually goes about selecting elements. For example, with 'div.entry', I presume it does something like a getElementsByTagName('div'), then iterates through those to find the ones that have class 'entry'. If jQuery stores that somewhere and .end() has some sort of magic to get the precomputed list back that $() itself doesn't, I thought it might be slower. The method you showed avoids that, but at the cost of precious, precious keystrokes. I guess I'll just poke around in the code at some point to see what's going on.
I've recently been through this decision process. I had v1.0 of http://shellshadow.com using mysql. I ran into one bug in my assumption about how mysql was handling unique constraints and from there started to look at postgres again.
It turned out my decision to move to postgres, which I put in production last month, was more about timing of pfg 8.3 coming to maturity than absolutes against mysql.

Here are a few points that tipped things to postgres.
1 - constraints and complex queries. MySql handles simple selects fast but has somewhat unpredictable behavior on complex queries. Including counts. Postgres generally scales in proportion to complexity of the query well.
2 - Postgres 8.3 came out. This was a big deal as it cleans up lots of things that want into 8.x.
3 - BSD-style engineering. Everything from docs to source code to make files is more rigorous with old school BSD projects. FreeBSD and Postgres are clean!!! I don't want to hammer on linux, GNU, GPL stuff too much, but to be honest, this camp is stable because of massive user base and companies put in effort to make it stable. Its a sledgehammer approach. In general I find projects like FreeBSD and Postgres to follow more rigid engineering processes. I like this in my DB ;)
4 - Full Text Search built into postgres 8.3. MySQL has FTS, sort of. Postgres prior to 8.3 had it as an add-on. You can run external Full Text Search engines like lucene or
ferret or maybe even better, sphinx. But this adds one more "engine" to manage. Most real world FTS use cases needs to have its results filtered in context of user prefs and have results filtered and sorted by other DB criteria. This means that for many FTS use cases, it is very desirable to just give the DB one big complex query and have it return things all sorted out. Using an external FTS system, you usually end up taking your FTS results and going back to the DB for further queries to filter and sort the FTS results. This adds to app code complexity. With postgres 8.3, you can do this in ways that MySQL cannot begin to compete with.

Hope these rational help. I am very happy with my decision to switch from MySQL to postgres and the process was not painful.

good luck, Jon
www.shellshadow.com
I think there are examples on both sides that are successful.

The iPod is fantastic design.
Myspace is absolutely hideous design.
Take a look at "Emotional Design" by Don Norman (http://www.amazon.com/o/asin/0465051359/pchristensen-20 )

The thesis is that if you present people with two [websites, machines, etc] that function identically but one is beautiful, people will be measurably better at using the pretty one, and they'll enjoy the experience more too.
Also, that really sounds like a ridiculous class. It's part of the film school? How could they expect mundanes to do programming (even HTML/CSS) in a class with no programming prerequisites? Is your friend on the only team without a CS major?
jQuery maintains a stack of previously selected collections of elements and adds to it every time you call a method that modifies the current selection in some way; calling .end() simply pops the stack back to the previous stored collection.
The filesystem doesn't handle concurrency and atomicity of some operations well, while in web apps it is absolutely necessary - you serve multiple users concurrently and you will inevitably have some shared data.

I tried to avoid databases in my web projects in the past and ended up having quite complicated concurrency infrastructures, based on shared memory and the filesystem. I can't say I was happy with the complexity I got.

Databases, no matter how ugly, clumsy, handle it nicely. In a few cases I made a complete switch to DB and had my code reduced significantly.

So, for me this is still an open question.
I would just continue without signing the contract (as long as he pays) and wait some more time how things turns out.
You agreed to work on this as a contractor, for pay. You aren't being taken advantage of if you agreed to a price ahead of time (cap or no cap).

Just because they have a good idea doesn't mean you have to be involved, there will be other great ideas that come your way as well.

And hell, if this is successful, believe me: you don't want to be in business with the kind of guy who a) goes to his father for help on such a simple thing and b) would think a 17-page contract was a good idea in any way.
With video blogging/commenting? Not in a thousand years. It's neither an useful nor a fun activity, so the market will be small. Furthermore, the business model is classic 'web 2.0' hype.
I suppose there already is a contract. At least in my country, vocal contracts are binding, too. Then a lot of "default laws" apply, if the contract does not specify anything else.
good design will attract people, good usability will keep them. I say focus on simple usuability first, then graphical niceness.
Postgresql

1. license less confusing
2. great mailing list support
This is something of a straw man, since they were talking about "taking a 1 in 10’000 bet that you can make billions, it is better to take a 1 in 10 bet that you can make millions."

Although the article pre-empts the need of billions by setting the context as "lifestyle business", it is good that you remind of the downside.
When did greenbar get known as "zebra striping"?
It's way too fast for whois. They're probably using the COM/NET/ORG Zone files in a nicely indexed db. I'd be interested to know more about the back end - they get points for responsiveness.
I second the Steve Jobs Stanford speech.

And good advice from my wife: "get outside more and do some exercise". So time to switch off HN and go for a bike ride!
Great examples.

I think functionality overrides appearance, at least until competition steps in. Reddit and YC are examples of spartan design but great loyalty among readers young and old. It's the idea and the execution first followed by the quality of design.

We see it all the time: small company comes up with cool product but not-so-cool packaging/marketing. Once they become successful, they hire people who make their packaging/marketing as good as the product.

I guess I fall on the side of "Product First, Marketing Second." It could be that a great website design is more about marketing than product but I don't know.
Kaizen - Improvement is Continuous
Stupid hacker tricks: The folly of youth
Ask YC: Ripping RealMedia streams
I found a Godel, Escher, Bach class on MIT's OCW (http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/hs/geb/VideoLectures/index.htm ) but the video lectures are in streaming Real Media format. It'll be over my cold, rigor mortis locked body that I ever install RealOne on my computer again, so I was hoping someone could recommend a (preferably free) program to rip the .rm streams to a local file format.

Thanks in advance!
Yahoo.com Sends a Ton of Talkative Traffic
Is Flickr Worth $4 Billion?
Why Reading Books Matters to a Programmer
We use postgresql at http://massify.com

I don't have enough experience with MySQL to be objective. I chose PostgreSQL because it had a feature set relatively on parity with Oracle and the other big boys. So far I haven't been disappointed.

Well, except for tool support. I'm still looking for a good schema diff tool for it (something as brilliant as SQL Compare by red gate) and a good ER tool (something as simple but functional as Enterprise Manager for SQL Server).

Otherwise, I really haven't considered looking at anything else.
Did Apple invest in P.A. Semi prior to acquisition?
mplayer -playlist http://mfile.akamai.com/7870/rm/mitstorage.download.akamai.c... -dumpstream -dumpfile OCW_7.01.07_Godel-220k.rm
First: recognize that you made a mistake here. Accepting the money without a contract is only going to confuse things. Pay the money back, (borrow from the First National Bank of Mom and Dad if you have to).

While doing so, tell Roomie (and RoomieDad) that you want equity. Explain that you like the idea, and think you have a lot to contribute. Also explain that if they're not interested in giving you equity, that's cool-- you haven't signed anything giving up the IP on what you wrote, and while you're happy to let him use it for his class project, you retain the commercial rights to your code.

Try not to make it sound adversarial. Explain how psyched you are about the idea. And, when you get a revised contract from RoomieDad, get a lawyer of your own to look it over before you sign it. (Again, prostrate yourself before Mom and Dad if you have to-- it's not pleasant, but an hour of a lawyer's time is worth it.)
I initially wanted to settle on MySQL for the sake of simplicity. But got bitten twice by it and have since changed my mind.

a) Once I had to store a large chunk of time series data in MySQL 'TEXT' field. Got errors in the application, could not figure out where they are coming from.

Turned out, MySQL has 1 to 65535 characters limit for TEXT field, and I should have used LONGTEXT type. MySQL has simply bitten the tail off my data and happily stored the rest without any errors or warnings. OK, I should have RTFM but still, the idea of a database corrupting my data without any warning makes me very uncomfortable...

b) Second issue that I've discovered is simply the ability to make 'hot backups' to SQL text files. pg_dump will produce consistent backup from working db server, mysqldump requires you to stop the server or to lock its tables etc. 'Hot backup' of mysql databases can be achieved through other methods/tools but at the cost of greater complexity.
Crawling is harder than it looks
Data mob: Shopping Centers
I have found that the situations you really need clustering are few and far between in the world of web apps. We had over 20M users and we're running fine on one 2U database server. It had 6 disks (RAID 5, with two hot spares) and 16GB of memory. The indexes all fit in memory.

The acquiring company of our business immediately decided they wanted more hardware for clustering, and set up Slony. I was semi-involved in it, and I witnessed no problems. On a bigger scale, I understand that skype uses pgsql and obviously does clustering: https://developer.skype.com/SkypeGarage/DbProjects/SkypePost...

Also check out http://highscalability.com/postgresql-high-availability-webs... and http://highscalability.com/skype-plans-postgresql-scale-1-bi...
Don't work with this guy. He's trying to take advantage of you.

If his dad is a lawyer, you are going to be in a trouble if you actually get into some kind of a disagreement with the guy. He can say that you did in fact have a verbal agreement and that he showed you the papers and you agreed.

$400 is very, cery little money if there is a possibility of legal fight involved and by giving you the contract he has laready showed that he's serious about the legal stuff.
T's the End of Cable As We Know It
I thought about that too and the timing of the new relaease is a big factor in the decision making.

A year ago is would have been MySQL, just because everyone else who is big is them (e.g. paypal, google, amazon etc.) but now I really think PostgreSQL is the better choice and will be going ahead with it until I can think of a reason not to.

It is now just as fast, but much more robust

Thanks
Have you tried DbVisualizer? I don't think it does schema diff, but it covers quite a few other features in Enterprise Manager and can extract ERDs from your schema. It's relatively cheap too (or free with limitations) and works with any database with a JDBC driver.

There's also Aqua Data Studio. I've never used it, but it looks pretty awesome. A little pricey, though.

http://dbvis.com/products/dbvis/
http://www.aquafold.com/
With a contract or any written agreement you are putting yourself in a difficult position. Clarify things with him asap and put something in writing what you agree upon.
I think the younger you are, the more willing you are to want to customize something to express yourself and personalize the experience (some of the younger generation would put stickers on their iPods).

The older you are, the less apt to want to bother you are: you want it to just work, and you don't have time to customize every little thing.