skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
see http://markkit.net - the web highlighter
Humans are irrational. Even the person who thinks themselves the most rational will do irrational things from time to time, especially under stressful situations.

And if you think you can always overcome mental intertia and will yourself to do something: "Brain Scanner Can See Your Decisions Before You Make Them"
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=162863
http://markkit.net - the web highlighter pen
Prisoner of Amazon.com (checkout)
Cuzillion: Performance best practices tool
Nike+ with more sports, no flash, and discussions everywhere.
This isn't new - it's probably Wikipedia's best kept secret though. It first got saved to del.icio.us in November 2006: http://del.icio.us/url/08d335d4c1d2f491cc70e1bf61e5d880
Which of his opinions are not what you would expect from a person of his stature?
Why are you skeptical of literate programming with multi-person teams? It seems to me that the value of literate programming would increase exponentially in relation to the number of people reading the code.
The last time a friend of mine went there for work (I personally only went there for an internship with a 90days tourist visa to avoid embassy bullshit), they asked him to apply for a visa with a bureaucracy like the one we have here in France : "you have to go back to France to apply for the visa there in the Paris embassy".

If you want a economically more active country, you might consider Chile too, but I don't know anything about visas there.
Lisp in Vim
For a counterpoint...I worked for a year, went to an elite college, got a degree, and I'm not sure I'd recommend it either. Yeah, I could probably get hired at Google if I wanted, but I don't want to - and the rest of my resume isn't nearly as impressive as yours is.

If you're bright and independent-minded, the opportunity cost of that 4 years of college is huge. I did very little related to computers in those 4 years - I did get my degree in CS, and I worked on a large volunteer website, and I did a couple projects for my school, but I spent most of my time there as a physics major or trying out various liberal-arts classes. I graduated when I was 24. I have a friend that's 23, and he's currently maintaining 2 open source projects, formerly on another one (LiveJournal), has a good job in a specialized niche, previously had been a startup cofounder that went bust really quick, and has done webmonkey consulting for dozens of different organizations.

So I dunno. As you say, the problem is that it's impossible to tell ahead of time what you want out of life. When I was 20 and entering college, I sorta instinctively knew I wanted to be a startup software engineer (which is what I wanted at 19) yet told myself I wanted to be a theoretical physicist (which is what I wanted at 18) and went to a liberal arts school (which is what I wanted at 17). If it turns out you were wrong when you were young, then you thank your lucky stars that you went to that elite college and have many doors open before you. But if it turns out you were right, then you might be cursing yourself for the lost time spent hedging your bets instead of developing your specialty.

One other thing: doors do slam shut if you choose not to walk through them. I have friends who are in their late 20s or early 30s, straight-A alums of this elite college, and they've had a series of temp jobs because they couldn't decide what they wanted to do with their life. They're finding now that they're on the "no career" career. And while most of them are reasonably happy with their lives, they can't go back to the investment bank or biotech research lab or big software company that they turned down a job from upon graduation.
Poetically perfect twitter tweet
"Why are you skeptical of literate programming with multi-person teams? "

I guess it is because I am not convinced about many people working on a piece of prose (vs code). As I understand literate programming, the "text" evolves parallelly with the code.

Having said that, I'd be interested in knowing if anyone managed a successful lp project with more than one person (or a couple of persons).
ThinkGeek now selling Optimus Maximus Keyboard (113 LCD screen keys)
Reminds me a lot of Photosynth

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129
"Does your soccer team have problems staying organized? My site fixes that. www.myurl.com."

It's good because anyone who has been on a soccer team knows how shoddy their communication methods typically are and will likely ask some barrier-breaking questions to allow me to explain the site further. Any leads the pitch generates is relevant (no one who doesn't care about soccer will want more information).
$100 million and they couldn't develop something decent?
I'm perplexed on why/how other companies didn't sue SAP for this and just swallowed the pill.

QFT: "...you really can’t fool all the people all the time."
You might find the UK is about to have a "nasty turn" WRT the lending crisis, increasing inflation and rising fuel costs. Taxes are very high also, and the government seem a bit clueless about the relationship between high earners and entrepreneurship, eg:

http://telegraph.decenturl.com/non-domicile-tax-charge

All in all, not a bad place to live and do business but it might get worse, not better, for a few years.
How did you go about getting the word out about your site? Did you purchase advertising or was it all word of mouth? Congrats!
Hmm. Good to know. Overstaying tourist visas seems like a gray area.
9. I bought the domain, it was very inexpensive.

10. NJ LLC, incorporated a month after the site went live.

11. Sorry, can't comment.

12. 8+ months of full-time development. Plus it had been on my mind a long time before that.

13. Every website does, it's inevitable. With fantasy sports applications the problem is magnified because every single one of your users will access the site at the exact same time (e.g., 4 PM on Sundays for football).
London actually is starting to trump Boston in terms of Startup community quality. Strong in online advertising, gaming and mobile sectors. Super high quality investors here (Atomico, Index, Accel). Its expensive here, but if you want to take on an untapped market and expand your horizons, this is a tough yet good place to start.
I'm a high school student -- and I feel exactly the same way (I haven't learned many useful things.)

Work, network, and work more are what keeps me going.
The Ideal Times To Raise Capital In The Life Cycle Of A Fund
Could you tell us some technical details about the project? What did you use to make it? How the website handles the huge increase in traffic during football season? I'd be interested to know about any technical information you would be willing to share.
Better speak French if you choose Montreal because of the language laws. Otherwise you might be in for a shock when you discover that speaking English is not an acceptable job requirement.
Hey, I take exception to the bad weather comment! We're currently having a very nice spring. Lots of flowers.

Yeah, I think the Valley has a certain magic to it, but if you're outside of there, and have no plans to move, it doesn't really matter where you end up.

I've got a friend that moved to Panama (not to do a startup, but to work remotely). He loves it because his cost of living is low, it's got great infrastructure and a very nice climate.
My friend has been studying French for years and is quaking at the thought of the Test de connaissance du français
This was interesting.

In the microcosm of this experiment, the choice of the free candy bar is irrational. The kids are actually choosing between two outcomes: outcome A which is three Hershey's kisses and small Snickers bar, and outcome B which is two Hershey's kisses and a large Snickers bar. Outcome B is definitely better.

Interestingly, in the grand scheme of things this isn't so illogical. If, for example, this was more like a storefront, where the kids could come and at any time get either free small Snickers bars or large Snickers bars for one kiss, then the former strategy is actually better.

Take this another step further and start to consider the cost of decision making itself. Think of the mental cost of constantly processing every outcome in search of maximum benefit and minimum cost. In the long run, applying the heuristic of FREE = GOOD is probably the best strategy from a cost/benefit perspective, since in most cases it does actually work.

This is a long way of saying that I think opting for free is not always rational in the immediate context but probably makes sense as a sort of general strategy for individuals in life.

Maybe I'm just restating the obvious but I thought I would throw this out there.
I didn't read it, I was too paranoid that I'd get to the last page and it would be a rickroll.
Distribute GPL'd software with closed source library?
Is it allowed by the GPL to distribute an open source application along with a closed-source library (ie. .so or dll binary) to be used from within that application? Or does such distribution force GPL'ing of the library as well? I'm unclear as to whether this is a derived work of the GPL app or not..
Canada is very business friendly, so drop that 'bureaucracy' concern. Forming a corporation took about 24 hours, with most of that time spent waiting for corporate name approval. Everything (except for getting a lawyer to notarize a form -- about $25 or so and five minutes of my time) was done online and there are TONS of resources to help start up. I think I spent around $200 in total to get all the corporate paperwork filed -- it was trivial.

This site will provide all the information you need: http://corporationscanada.ic.gc.ca/epic/site/cd-dgc.nsf/Intr...

Annual corporate paperwork takes me just a few minutes each year (all done online) and taxes are likewise easy to put together. Any questions I've had about the company, taxes, etc. were quickly answered either through the Corporations Canada web site or after a brief e-mail dashed off to their contact e-mail address.

As a sole founder of a software startup, I really couldn't be happier at my (by accident of birth) choice of nation. I've been able to just focus on building a business and quickly deal with the legal and tax stuff as minimally needed.
It will put America and silicon valley to shame if this guy can't get some capital to take this to a web-based system with a better interface. This deserves to be used and available.
Simulating Crowd Dynamics: Flow Lanes and Character Animation
It's still a work in progress I think. It was hard to find for me too, when I built http://www.wikirandom.org
I don't know, I stayed in the legal area.
I was in Mendoza, so I went to Chile 2 week-ends to get a new 90 days visa each time, but I was legal : my internship wasn't compensated.
The site said the injection is Hex encoded. Therefore, sanitising the input won't work because the injection isn't using any single quotes at all. To be honest, I have no idea how to sanitise Hex encoded input, in either MS SQL or MySql od Postgres.

The important part seems to be the fact that MS SQL allows "query stacking by separating the queries." Does this mean you can input multiple queries without using a semicolon (which you'd normally escape if you're not using a prepare statement) in MS SQL, and thus this is how the injection worms its way into your DBMS?

Besides, what does he mean by"by separating the queries"? A space? Surely not.

I don't fully understand it. Anyone?
A friend of mine used an adsense campaign with ads pointing to a poll. Seemed to work well.
A lot depends on the market you are trying to reach. While the concept for market research is going to be the same, the methods used to gather that research need to be tailored in order to achieve the best results. Anyone can poll 1000 people and ask them what they think, but if 900 of those people do not understand your market or would not find a use for your product/solution the chances of gathering useful data are minimal. Can you provide more specifics as to what your target demographic is or what your product is?
I'm the author of the original blog post and I wholeheartedly agree.
Yes, I spent 2 years by the Swiss border and I went there a couple of times, it seems a fine country but expensive (and the interesting part speaks german, and they are not in the euro area).
They have very good public transportation system, banks everywhere (but I don't know about VC stuff), mountains.
That's true, but a lot of people in the core of Montreal also speak fluent English and there doesn't seem to be much attitude towards English speaking people (in that area)

And hey, French isn't too hard to learn :)
update: here is the online version! http://www.supermemo.net
Polls are generally horrible. Self-selection bias, self-deception (i.e., what one perceives of one's self and what one actually does are almost always different and often wildly so), and self-disclosure bias (i.e., what one wants (others) to believe about one's self).

The entire analyst industry is basically built to do this. Of course, they tend to be ridiculously biased because they are getting paid so much for their opinions. Finding friends who work at places that already have the reports is one way to get them. :-)

In terms of actually useful data... Look for information about the users' and customers' actual behavior -- i.e., where the user/customer actually had to do something real like visit repeatedly, pay money, recommend you to other people, etc. As a number of folks mentioned at SUS, if you don't have information directly relevant to your play then look for various proxies and triangulate.
If it makes you feel any better, I guess you're performing a valuable service to society. You're keeping the market working the way it should by ensuring that stations with slightly lower prices get less business than stations with higher prices, which helps keep the prices down for the rest of us. So in addition to those one or two dollars of savings, you should also get the warm glowy feeling of being a public benefactor. Congratulations!
Depends on what kind of penalty you mean. I know at my university you can take a leave of absence for a semester with no academic penalty, but most people wouldn't do it because they're afraid of how it would look on a transcript/resume.
And don't forget a great banking sytem.

;-)
I'm a Bill 101 refugee (yes I'm old!) but I really loved living in Montreal. Other than the language issues (and you're probably correct in downplaying them) it's a great city. And (other than the language issues) a great place for startups.
Loadable modules are something of a grey area, but in general the consensus is that yes they are derived works of the loading program, and thus must will be covered by the GPL if the overall program is itself GPL'd. The standard disclaimer applies, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.
I also find it hard to believe that Apple wants to get into the microprocessor business.

Of course, one of the biggest traditional problems with device manufacturers owning a chip supplier is that losing out on other chip customers (who don't want to buy from a competitor) means they lose economies of scale, and Apple probably has enough economies of scale in the device market internally.

Well, I suppose we'll see what the plan is with time.
Does anyone have any experiences about Berlin?

I'm thinking about going there.
SVD Recommendation System in Ruby
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html

Not sure if this answers your question 100%, but I hope it points you in the right direction.

If a program released under the GPL uses plug-ins, what are the requirements for the licenses of a plug-in?

It depends on how the program invokes its plug-ins. If the program uses fork and exec to invoke plug-ins, then the plug-ins are separate programs, so the license for the main program makes no requirements for them.

If the program dynamically links plug-ins, and they make function calls to each other and share data structures, we believe they form a single program, which must be treated as an extension of both the main program and the plug-ins. This means the plug-ins must be released under the GPL or a GPL-compatible free software license, and that the terms of the GPL must be followed when those plug-ins are distributed.

If the program dynamically links plug-ins, but the communication between them is limited to invoking the `main' function of the plug-in with some options and waiting for it to return, that is a borderline case.
You get what you pay for. If he would probably be paying market rate and not 1/3 of the market rate, he would probably have better applications. Good people simply won't apply at a lousy 20$ a hour.
Are you the Master of your Domain? | Increase Web Traffic, Search Engine Optimization and more
ask the fsf? I'm pretty sure that I've read they have people that will help you.

But I think it's the other way... you couldn't write a proprietary app based on a gpl library.

Look at all the 'open source' apps based on .NET and other windows technologyies.

I my self don't believe such apps are truly open source, as they rely on non open code.

"The standard disclaimer applies, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice."
Polls don't have to be filled with questions about what you would do, leaving room for inaccurate self-prediction. The questions could be "have you in the past month done x" which tend to be a bit closer to reality.

Also, certain techniques (randomizing the order of the poll questions for each visitor) and statistical functions can be used to get more accurate information from those polled.

But you're right, if done improperly you can get wildly inaccurate data (just look at past or current presidential election polls)
While I think the Optimus Maximus is a fantastic looking product, I've got to ask who has the money for this? Does anybody here own it yet or plan on purchasing it?
Depending on what you're doing, you could always try government or census records. For example, I know how many people are in my city, how much they make, how old they are, etc., and for my school I know how many credits the students are taking, the age, gender, and previous education of the population.
I live in Vancouver and just started a game studio.
http://smartfulstudios.com

Bureaucracy is not a problem. I'm not sure what you mean by that.

There is tons of government help with SRED, IRAP, the Renaissance Fund, and Telefilm New Media Fund.
http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/taxcredit/sred/menu-e.html
http://irap-pari.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/
http://www.cse.gov.bc.ca/ProgramsAndServices/BusinessService...
http://www.telefilm.gc.ca/03/311.asp?fond_id=3

With UBC and SFU, there is a lot of tech and business talent. Vancouver Film School and Emily Carr add to the art talent.

Since we have universal health insurance, and a fairly decent social safety net, it is actually cheaper to provide benefits to your employees in a lot of cases.

Vancouver is an expensive city to live in. But definitely not as expensive as the valley.

The infrastructure is good. I can get a 50Mbps internet connection in my apartment.

The women are gorgeous and fit. Skiing, sailing, golfing, climbing, hiking amenities are close by.

Yeah, it drizzles for 4 months of the year. But you get used to it.

The VCs are very approachable. Send any of them an email with the subject header, "30 Minute, no harm, no foul meeting" and they will hear you out.

If you're trying to get from zero to fundable, check out my friends over at Bootup Labs.
http://bootuplabs.com/
YC user 'wheels' is there - ask him (he's often on #startups, too).
Montreal seems like the place to be if you're starting small. Vancouver might have a stronger talent base but their startup culture is a little top-heavy -- it's mostly VCs and angels spinning off their own ideas, whereas in Montreal there's a vibrant startup community and VCs are actively seeking early-stage concepts to invest in (like here: http://montrealstartup.com/). And yeah, it's a beautiful city and housing is really cheap. I'd move there if I could but the only startups looking to hire talent are the well-funded ones in Vancouver.
The current price is ridiculous. Sell it for $100 and people will actually buy it.
Think of the mental cost of constantly processing every outcome in search
of maximum benefit and minimum cost.

That's an interesting observation... It would be extremely exciting if we could somehow process real-world information and create programs that calculated and displayed this kind of information to us. Humans seem to be lousy at this, and hence there is great potential for making machines that allow us to make more efficient decisions.

It is the same idea as applying fuzzy/probabilistic logic and rules of interference to the real world; the main technological difficulty isn't the logic per se, but translating information about the real world to a format we can apply the rules of logic to. I wonder what scientific insights we need to make before it becomes possible to do these things...it's got to be possible, right?
Debugging Science
You know I used to want this keyboard a lot, but now I would happily settle for one of those super thin aluminum mac ones. This isn't quite in vogue anymore.
This is really worth having a look at. Summarises all things semantic web excellently.
I program a lot of Matlab (going to switch to NumPy any day) for my signal processing research and I too just discovered literate programming. I think it's an incredibly good idea, to switch the status of code and comments---holding myself to the same standards in documenting my programs as I do in writing journal papers (using latex for both), and placing code in special delimiters. This is probably not too important for you web developers but I think it's going to revolutionize my scientific computing.

A very nice comment: "Incidentally, with Linux I much prefer the keyboard focus that I can get with classic FVWM to the GNOME and KDE environments that other people seem to like better. To each his own." Let me know if anyone wants an fvwmrc to try out how amazing keyboard focus can be.
I assume you mean Montreal, Quebec.
Can we stop blaming Jesse Spano already? It was like over a decade ago, and it wasn't her fault!
I've used noweb (http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/nr/noweb/) with Python and Emacs for about a year. Not for everyone, but I love it.
I'm not sure I should win an award for creating a blacklist. I mostly did it because it was a fun exercise in javascript (which I am learning).
That's right, the current price is ridiculous. But I think given the tremendous advantages to such a technology (my keyboards hardly ever displayed the "right" labels out of the box), we can expect it to become a commodity in the near future (10-15 years?).

Now, I think there's a little problem with this keyboard... looking up at your keys all the time is not the most productive way to use a keyboard. They market it to geeks, yet I think consumers would find it useful the most.
Noweb — A Simple, Extensible Tool for Literate Programming
What's #startups?