skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Or they're biting off more than they can chew ;)

I'm trying to manage my main software business right now, plus starting a new startup which now has a fairly firm deadline of delivering our beta release by the week of May 20th (some promotional opportunities arose that we wanted to take advantage of, now we're booked for those so it's do or die!).

I know I have workaholic tendencies, and I agree they ought to be curbed (balance produces so much more and so much faster in my experience), but right now I don't have much choice. I imagine many startups, esp. those funded by day jobs, find themselves in similar situations.

So maybe temporary or binge workoholism is worth it, as long as it's not habit forming :)
Local Filesystem API for the Browser
socialmedia.com: Facebook ad alternative. They put up ads on fb apps, and they're a little more responsive.

And yes, internal ads by fb generally suck. But if you can hit a sweetspot, you're in for a nice ROI. You've got to do some shady things to get there, but it's possible nonetheless.
His acceptance of payment / verbal contract amounts to him granting license, not transfer of copyright.

You don't have to take anybody's word for it. Most of title 17 is reasonably accessible:

Ownership:

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/usc_sec_17_00000201----...

See especially the definition of "work made for hire" here:

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/usc_sec_17_00000101----...
We've been hesitating letting Google Analytics into our secured site. This looks like a great alternative.
how about a regex maintainer. it's no problem to write one in the first place.
Having a look through the utilities, these seem to be pulling the data from here directly.

Would it not be more efficient to co-ordinate with pg on some kind of organised periodic data dump that could be mirrored efficiently?

I've got a decent amount of space on a decent box with a sufficiently fat connection. Mirroring pg's data dump on there wouldn't be a problem and would save this site being spidered by umpteen different people.
Definitely don't sign! It very well may have potential, and you didn't start assuming you'd be building someone else's empire. If one is being built, you should be a founder too. Technically at this point, the copyright ownership on that code is entirely yours. You've simply granted him a license to use it for his original intended purpose (handing it in for school).

It may just be that his dad pushed him to do that, but I would be concerned with trust if he's already tried to pull something like that. You do need to be able to trust the other founders.

Also, if he or his dad suggest to help work out an agreement between you two, get separate legal counsel. That's a clear conflict of interest (which if his dad doesn't disclose that to you up front, could land him in hot water too).

So you do have cards to play, but figure out if you want to play with these people specifically. Ideas are not that hard to come by, as others on here have said -- it's execution that counts.
This is what happens when you blindly outsource to India
The Freakonomics guys discussed deliberate practice recently on their NYT blog: http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/11/how-did-a-r...
How to prevent duplicate submissions-- a standard way to specify URL equivalency?
Nytimes urls got me again this morning-- didn't mean to submit a dupe, and HN's dupe catcher didn't catch it.

What if in robots.txt, there was a way to specify which query parameters in a URL are unique to the content?

e.g.

UniqueContentURLParameters: "articleID","node"

would mean that dupe checkers would know to ignore those parameters that don't match any of the items in the list.

http://news.ycombinator.com/robots.txt:
UniqueContentURLParameters: "id"

http://nytimes.com/robots.txt:
UniqueContentURLParameters: none

Of course, this doesn't solve the problem of bad URL design, such as the BBC news site, where you have

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7391008.stm

and

http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/mpapps/pagetools/print/news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7391008.stm

I guess you could specify a list of regexes?

Alternatively to a robots.txt, I could see a shared database for linksharing/social news sites to accumulate this information.

How would you solve this problem?
Maybe I'm not a "reasonably good" programmer, but I use this tool all the time. Lots of languages have little re nuances that may be hard to remember.
http://isittuesday.com/ :o
MySpace Embraces Data Portability, Partners With Yahoo, Ebay And Twitter
1. Appreciate how lucky you are to be starting something from nothing.

2. The less cash you spend the longer you have to make your dream possible. Spend cash in the right places. Like health insurance.

3. Never interrupt a good salesperson in the middle of their pitch, even if they are saying something incorrect. Tell them afterwards, and if it's important enough they can always call the customer/investor and clear it up.

4. Read contracts. A lot of the time they don't make sense. Sentences go on forever. Don't take that crap. Make a lawyer spell things out and simplify. Make sure you read and understand every detail, particularly investment agreements.
These people are not your friends.
They are not your parents.
They are not looking out for your best interests.
Your lawyer isn't either. Lawyers are just making sure you are not going to get sued and such. They are not looking out for your best business interests. Do not think because a lawyer says a contract is 'pretty good' that the lawyer has evaluated the business implications of it.

5. Don't listen to accountants when they say the word 'profit'. It's an illusion. It doesn't necessarily mean you made money. You could in fact have ended the year or month with less cash (and assets) than you had at the beginning, which sound to me like an unprofitable year or month, but they will take numbers from an accrued loss and add them up to make profit.
This kind of profit isn't going to help you pay rent or hit payroll. And savy investors can read through it. Cash is all that matters.
So when a suit* say 'cash is king', which is often their 'advice', what they really mean is focus on the cash flow, not the balance sheet.

*a 'suit' is someone who has started a few companies and is quite successful, but doesn't remember the early nitty gritty days of suffering and fear, so they like to say things like 'cash is king' to summarize all their mistakes of running out of cash.

6. Figure out how to make and read a cash flow and balance sheet. It's like a doctors chart for a business. If you have no revenue, and you have 'project' revenue in your cash flow chart, make 2 more. One with no projected revenue, and one with 1/3 what you projected.
This tells you how long your company will survive in the worst case and most likely case scenario. Chances are your actual revenue will be 1/2 to 1/3 of what you expect it to be (in the beginning, with no history or trends, and a brand new product in a new market) The more prepared you are for this the more likely chance you'll have of surviving.

And, if your 100% right, you have better problems to solve than running out of money. :)
wrt robots.txt, what is the incentive for site owners to prevent duplicate submissions? As a site owner, wouldn't I be happy if both http://www.myadsenseblog.com and http://myadsenseblog.com get submitted? 2x15 minutes of fame!
Game’s high score could earn the Nobel
Good point! I thought about that when I was writing the article, but it was late at night so I let it slide. Of course someone at HN would point it out. :)

I tried to make the point (obviously unsuccessfully) that no matter what else I am doing throughout the day, I tend to read feed items at about the same rate - or so I thought. The Google Reader data isn't really scientific, just meant to illustrate that I was reading MORE on Tuesday when I thought I was having the same level of productivity the entire week. I guess I think that it can be extrapolated to reflect on the other things that I'm working on throughout the day? Like I said, it's not scientific.

(And trust me, I'm also doing other things other than reading feed items, like posting here!)
I would advise you to talk to an IP attorney. They can probably help you rather cheaply and might not even charge.

You're going to get a lot of moderately but not fully informed opinions on this site, as you're talking to a lot of people who have probably dealt with one end of somewhat similar situations. When it comes to law you're best talking to experts who have your exact situation in mind.
I tried MySQL like 2 years ago and out of the box it preferred to insert a known-invalid "000000" date than aborting loudly.

The last thing I want my DB to do is corrupt my data silently. There were other braindead "philosophy" problems but I don't remember what they are.

Been a happy user of Postgres ever since.
If pg can give us nightly snapshots that can be mirrored, it will be awesome.
What if I want to build a device to run Android?
I'm really interested in slate tablet style computers and I'm looking into building a prototype of one this summer. I think it would be cool if it could run Android and leverage all of the apps people are writing for that but I can't find any info about what hardware to use. Can someone in a garage build an Android capable device? Is it really an "Open Handset Alliance" if the only people who can build the handsets are established phone makers?

Anyone have any info on this?
Free Evernote invites
You Can't Do Both: You can't fix weaknesses _and_ build on strengths
New Weblogs Inc (AOL) site: Big Download
I’m glad you like it!

Unfortunately, there is no way to import del.icio.us links yet, but that feature will be available soon.
YC News: A Shift From Articles to Advice
Dude...people are down-modding you because you're being a jerk, not because of some misunderstood intricacy of your brilliant scientific argument.

First off, a quick search tells me that Kawecki has been publishing on this topic for years:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=kawecki%20quinine%20lear...

He's had numerous publications in PNAS, Science, Evolution, and other top-tier journals, building this hypothesis step-by-step. So perhaps you should back off your rhetoric about the research being a "joke" just a tad, okay? (At the least, perhaps you should go read one of his other papers before you decide that the man is a fraud.)

Now, to directly address your argument: "intelligence" is not a single trait. It's a complex, emergent phenomena, presumably involving many genes, in many different genetic loci. It's therefore highly unlikely that selection for the abstract trait of "intelligence" is also going to select for a decreased lifespan (another complex trait).

Thus, even if you're right, and even if the whole result is attributable to single-trait selection for "intelligence", it's still an interesting result. You've done nothing do "debunk" the interesting premise of the article -- that selection for intelligence appears to decrease overall fitness in flies.

Your obsession with single-trait selection seems to rest on the notion that if the result could be attributable to linkage, then it doesn't count. That's silly. We can debate the mechanism of action, but there appears to be a very real trade-off between learning ability and survival in this particular species. Arguing that it might only be a consequence of selection is to completely miss the point.

(Aside: I think it's interesting that you've now latched on to a subtle difference in wording between the NYT article and the claims made by the researcher. The NYT may have (debatably) been exaggerating the claims of the researchers, but your posts have all jumped to the conclusion that the original research was a "joke". Bad form, man.)
Startups Wiki: Ask YC Archive
I feel dissatisfied that the conclusion of this article doesn't answer the question of whether IKEA is on the up-and-up or if they are simply doing the whole Tax shelter thing. Now I really want to know.
Did not know this -- very cool.

One of the only reasons I still use MySQL is that PostgreSQL would break some Drupal sites I deployed. I miss the ease of obtaining relational integrity under Postgres (although pgsql's EXPLAIN can be horrifying compared to MySQL's).

Have scaled up to saturating an OC12 with Postgres (17 web servers) and doing 30 million hits/month with MySQL, so it's not like I care that much, but MySQL has a nasty tendency to piss me off in corner cases, and I'm getting tired of it.

Definite pros and cons to both. I've seen people stick with (and patch) a particular point release ofMySQL (eg. 3.23 for AdWords at one point) just because the errors were consistent and they were no longer doing much to the schema.
Never seen that happen with PostgreSQL.

Jeremy Zawodny's tools (mytop, etc.) are invaluable if you have to get a MySQL shop to scale up (eg. without migrating a metric fuckload of existing SQL), btw.
Microsoft has done some good work in the last couple of years at making their tools suck a lot less for web development. ASP.NET MVC, a newer framework with a Rails-like approach, is also coming along nicely.

Honestly, the main reason most ASP.NET websites suck so badly is that the Microsoft tries to make its tools accessible to developers who don't want to bother to learn and use web standards, and when used by the standards-oblivious, the resulting web apps are generally very poor in the standards compliance department.
Protagonize - an online community dedicated to collaborative fiction
Faviki is not for websites you visit frequently. It’s for websites you don’t want to forget. It provides a way to organize them and find it later. Wikipedia's role is to help organize bookmarks, and also to provide some useful info about concepts.
Quotably now has a reddit/hacker news-style view of links on twitter
Get the newest download (399).
will http://vectormagic.com/ help? unfortunately, no longer free.
> 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.

Run a slave, stop it, do mysqldump --single-transaction --master-data yourdbname off the slave to get a hot backup, and then restart the slave to get hot copies without shutting down writes. (I am going to assume that you round-robin your data into memcached from the read slaves if you are worried about a read lock on the master)

Not saying that you shouldn't use Postgres, but if you have to work with MySQL, the technique above produces consistent hot backups from 4.0.18 onwards.
I was keeping a list of these, and I just decided to make it public and build it out a bit. If you have additions/deletions/organization ideas, you can edit it, or just put them on the comment page: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Comments_on_Ask_...
I'd love to send my kids to this school instead http://go0dspeed.multiply.com/video/item/32/Schools_Designed...
The Microsoft platform has worked very well for Loopt as well, though I can't claim we're good enough to have had only two bugs since launch :)

As for cost, we spend less on software licensing per year than we do for our least compensated employee by a substantial margin. We've also had no issues with security thus far (fingers crossed).
That's a brilliant tax shelter - good for them.
I think it is a natural shift because all of us read basically the same feeds... so the articles themselves are usually not that important.. the discussion and advice is.
Fair enough, I apologize for being a jerk. That said, if the NYT had really said that "selection for intelligence appears to decrease overall fitness in flies" then I would have had no issue with the article. However, what the article actually said was that, "Learning also turns out to have dangerous side effects that make its evolution even more puzzling." That's not a minor error or a small exaggeration, it's outright fraud. And what's more, the entirety of this new article is based off the false premise of the original. That's why I'm upset.

Anyways, my apologies to the researcher. My issue is mainly with the NYT.
I think it don't worth $4 million, this is ridiculous
Entrepreneur Types from A-Z
I suggest you read up and let us know.
Greasemonkey Tip: Use jQuery inside of your Greasemonkey scripts
I think the advice is a great feature.
Don't pick a niche that you don't know how to reach. It can be very, very tough to market to a small niche--especially if you have something unique. Educating the potential customer when you don't even know how to reach them is costly.
pgsql's EXPLAIN can be horrifying compared to MySQL's

Really? I'm curious if you could explain what you found unintuitive about PG's EXPLAIN.

BTW, there's a "ptop" (pg_top) project for PostgreSQL as well.
The Value is in the Experience
if you think carefully about all the possible objections, then in certain fields, like social "sciences", most studies are no good.

some people do this with integrity and some don't. only the ones who don't actually publish in those fields. so there is a major selection effect. it's not true that all scientists are idiots, but most published scientists in certain fields seem to be. if you read a selection of studies then you can confirm this.
i can't downvote articles. only comments. and i have well over 25 karma.
I'm most interested in the last line of the quote at the top: "They found no relationship between a programmer’s amount of experience and code quality or productivity." Have other studies found this to be the case?

Anecdotally, I'd say there's a lot of truth to it. While nobody would dispute that a "visionary" or "trailblazer" with ten years of experience would be stronger than a visionary or trailblazer just out of college, I suspect the young visionary is a lot better than the experienced workhorse. Which is to say: experience matters, but not as much as which category you fall under.
I’m glad you like the concept. That is one of frustrations I've had with other bookmarking tools. I hope you’ll continue to use it! :)
If you are, then you must investigate
www.openmoko.com

Its an open-source linux based operating system - I think.
This is completely contradictory to your original argument. Your original argument was 'if you can do "better" and you're not-> you are guilty of having immoral values' Completely neglecting the subjectivity of morality, this statement above says that he should do what is best for himself, even if that is pokemon or football (citing your examples only..nothing wrong with pokemon or football), and I think the only global definition of morality is what one 'should do' (with a different set of rules in each subset definition).
don't back down or apologize because some jerk yelled at you "for being a jerk". :(

you made good points, which does not constitute being a jerk. he made invalid points about how the guy has a reputation and history that don't address whether the particular ideas at issue are true; plus, he literally called you a jerk, which is name calling.
I know a 15-year veteran programmer who always builds on-time (I know, that doesn't sound possible), and on-budget. His name is Rex Parker. His email is rex at streetsmartinc dot com. He's interested in talking to you.
Thanks for feedback. Right now RSS feeds are available for every page, but I definitely plan to make API in the future, and make it as open as possible for developers.
This would discourage other developers from working with the company out of fear for their own reputation in case something goes wrong.
Ruby on Rails Startup Heroku Gets $3 Million
I'm a native English speaker, and since the word is a colloquial one of comparatively recent origin, I've probably been using it for longer than it's been listed in most reference works. I know from my own experience that one of the senses (in fact, the main sense) is someone who works a lot but gets little done.

In any case, that's implied by definitions like the one you cite. Someone with a compulsion to work works a lot; otherwise you wouldn't call it a compulsion. And it's clear from the article that they're not talking about the kind of people who work a lot and achieve great things, since otherwise the message would be "Be Mediocre." So the only remaining possibility is that they're talking about people who work a lot and don't achieve much.
Quantcast Launches Demographic Search
I wonder, if anyone has put this data to some use.
* makes it easier to track if your content has gone viral or not

* votes aren't split across multiple copies: a few votes here, a few there, and maybe you could have made the front page

* users are less pissed off (looking at you, nytimes and bbc)
"In certain fields, like social "sciences", most studies are no good."

Saying the average social science paper is no good is like saying the average blog post is no good. Even if it's true, it's a completely meaningless statement because there are enough really good social science papers to keep you busy for the rest of your life.
Jeff Hawkins: Brain science is about to fundamentally change computing
I work .NET in my day job and Rails at night. I feel way more productive working in Rails that in .NET, even though I don't know the Ruby language as well as C# or VB.NET.
No, he's right, I was being a jerk.

I still stand by my argument though.
Simply amazing, glad to see games worth playing :) playing this game might be good karma
What was the partner option contingent on?
Any way to import my existing bookmarks from del.icio.us (and clean up the tags)? Seems like that's one of your biggest barriers to adoption, at least from people who already use a social bookmarking site.

The app looks great, nice and clean, but I already have hundreds of bookmarks in del.icio.us, and don't want to start from scratch somewhere else.
Nah, question is can YOU make it as good as google analytics. It's open source
cool service.. will be interested to see what they have in store

it currently seems like the ideal type of service to go dhh style profitable with no funding
yes, me too, I have been using del.icio.us for 1+ year and now I have a gigantic un-useful tag cloud. Your app will not solve the problem of having too much tags, but at least make tags more meaningful.
I would suggest you to integrate it with del.icio.us in some way because I don't really feel like switching to another bookmarks system at this point.
Wow, great work!

I even found some posts I made over 180 days ago.

Amazing how much smarter I got in 6 months.
Oh come on, this so takes the fun out of hacking regexs.
Start by taking a look at the hardware that is/will be supported. If I remember correctly, Texas Instruments has an ARM based development board that runs Android.
yes and no. i know what all the words mean, but when i read it and reread it, i didn't get an idea of what's actually unique about the site.
So weird... I was thinking of this very idea about an hour ago, but decided I didn't have time to implement it. Very nice implementation! The conversation here is valuable enough to save and annotate...
Did you delete text from your post, or is it all visible now?
every company should have a blog, yeh? And most use it for advertising, but is anyone else tired with the incessant preaching (and linking to news.yc) of 37signals?

I have great respect for their business, their founders and employees, and their theories about work.

But seriously, is that article going to change the way people work or think about work? Let each man and woman decide how they'd like to apply their own resources (namely: time and money) and let 37signals worry about building products.

Great marketing, but news.yc readers are more than aware of 37signals and most have probably already made up their mind of whether or not they agree with the company's methodology.