skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
White noise and soft lights are amazing. The trick is to find something that simulates being in the womb for the baby. I have one recommendation that you absolutely _must_ get. Best investment I've ever made:

http://www.amazon.com/Fisher-Price-Wonders-Soothe-Seahorse/d...

You would not believe how much more sleep we got after picking up one of those. My daughter just turned one and we still use it every night and for her naps.

In terms of general advice, just be prepared to be exhausted beyond your expectations. I was working at a startup when my daughter was born and ended up going back to work shortly after, it was very challenging to say the least.

The best advice I can give you is don't fool yourself into thinking you're going to be getting a lot of things done, the change of pace is astonishing when you come to realization that you brought something amazing into the world that is 100% dependent on you for survival. Its no longer about you. Enjoy being a parent, its an amazing experience.
You are correct, of course, but Latex and Word are the two main tools to write essays and such. In other words while they may be different systems, they are used in place of each other.

I've never seen someone editing an essay in InDesign (though I am sure there are such people).
.edu Links & SEO Authority: Tech Schools Top Rankings
VCs get away with it because:
1) They have reputations;
2) They have the money
3) It's a practical necessity for someone who looks at a dozen pieces of IP daily.

None of those cases apply to you, and as a general rule, no competent entrepreneur will pay a contractor who won't sign an NDA.

My recommendation would be to sign enthusiastically, because it means you got a job.
I wonder if they're going to be doing the same sneaky tracking via cookies and iframe that the Like Button does irrespective of whether you actually interact with it or not.
Hackers usually prioritise other stuff (eg: cool hacks) over monetization, hence the allure of hacker centric conferences.
Increase Your Conversion Rate by Shutting Up
SFLC's Eben Moglen Speaks
It's called a bookmarklet, and it's been around for years, and lets you share on any site, not just one(s) the website has considered it worth their time to integrate with.
There's all kinds of things wrong with what you said, but I'll focus on the off balance sheet asset claim.

Sure, almost every company "hides" assets and liabilities off balance sheet because it's standard accounting practice. There's lots of rules about it and it's perfectly reasonable to do in many situations. For instance, securitized risk is held off balance sheet because it effectively isn't an asset, liability or risk to the company that securitized it anymore. (That's the whole point of securitizing risk.) It is in general not true that "nobody can see them", since stuff like this generally has to be declared in financial reports. Yeah, you can't see it... if you're a lazy investor who just reads the quarterly financial statements and thinks that constitutes responsible investing.

There are some companies that try to cook the books and game the rules. Surprise. Whenever there are rules people will try to game them. All this tin-foil hat nonsense about "book cooking" as reported in "respected blogs" leading to the ruin of "almost every company" and the entire stock market seems too silly be true.
When I played that game I was ruining and picking up junky city debris! That sounds a scary language.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I didn't find an option to disable using Twitter's own shortening service?

As an extreme example, I find http://t.co/gpRQitG less informative than http://youtu.be/oHg5SJYRHA0. If your site is still only at 3 characters ID, unlike Youtube, having a custom shortened domain from which users can tell what it is, generally, what they're clicking on, is a much better user experience than using a universal shortener which says nothing about the content.
How do you get around the problem of one of these widgets taking forever to load and slowing down your site's render time? I noticed with the "Like" button that it was, on average, too slow to use on our home page. Am I doing it wrong?

We have a "Tweet this" link above our maps that has been getting good usage, and costs us nothing in terms of YADNSLU (yet another DNS lookup).
False. Linking to people I admire. I considered changing this (as I changed many parts of the site based on HN comments), but I like the links as a tribute to them.
Agreed, however I'm working at a job I hate (well not hate dislike) to save up to buy a house in a decent school district never mind retire.
Tell HN: www.next.com redirects to Apple.com
I just found that amusing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT#History
When will the fund raising market slow down?
I agree. First point on the copy is that people that are most likely to benefit from your services are the people that need someone to explain what a MVP actually is, and why they want one
Isn't she the one who recently posted looking for a cofounder to disrupt the wedding invitation racket?
Is not a matter of being humble, he is talking to professionals. They know no one grasps every aspect of TOC.
Why They Were Able To Raise Money
The links are fine but to make it kosher you need to put up some sort of description like "These fine folks inspired me. They are not affiliated with this service."
That would be the firmware flash memory, not Adobe Flash, by the way.
> there will be serious inflation in the next 20 years - I have no idea when, but bond yields will drop or become negative at some point.

These two statements are contradictory. Bond yields will skyrocket in the face of inflation. If you meant bond prices (which move inversely to yields) then you would be correct but your assertion, as presented, is false.

Also, please pick a 20-30 year timeframe in the last century where investment in bonds (for the entire period) would have underperformed (be destroyed, in your words) the S&P 500 for the same period.
I don't know anyone who's slaving away with the expectation of retiring to a permanent vacation.

No offence, this is probably because you are generation Y, well educated and surrounded by start-up mentality or in college.

Consider yourself lucky, but don't consider yourself the norm (yet at least).
Crazy Educational Rap Video a must see
crazy rap video, can't believe it.
From what I heard (I could be wrong), here in Belgium it is only illegal to be a contractor with only one customer; for the exact same reason as you state here: because such a contractor is actually a disguised employee and thus unfair competition to real employees.
I'd be happy to learn, why the downvote on datasift?
I would peg your fee against the quality of your portfolio.

For a ballpark estimate, try charging an hourly rate pegged at the yearly salary you want to make divided by 1000. My reasoning behind this is the other thread suggesting that contractors need 2x an employee's salary to cover for a lack of benefits balanced against the idea that a standard 40 hours x 52 weeks work year has 2000 hours.

Example: $50,000 * 2 / 2000 = $50/hr.
My organization had this same problem. We formed a cooperative corporation, filed for tax exempt status, and then opened bank and PayPal accounts. Within 7 days of opening the PayPal account for our org, it was frozen on the grounds that extra documentation was needed. Before I could send those documents, PayPal then turned around and froze my personal account since the organization's account had my name as the "responsible party" contact.

The resolution? There hasn't been one. I tried to get PayPal to accept our tax-exempt documents, but they've refused because we're not a 501(c)3 charity (we are 501(c)12) and both the org and my personal accounts stay frozen.
Not everybody can be featured on NYT without a product out, but setting up a basic marketing campaign is not difficult (and it is certainly inexpensive). That's my (current) recipe:

. Twitter and Facebook -
Open a twitter and facebook company account. Invite all your friends and colleagues.
Follow interesting people (blogger and tech leader). Most importantly: don't spam, but engage in conversations.

. Blog -
Obviously, you need a blog. Don't make it a boring marketing blog. Keep a personal voice. Talk about your experience building the product/company. Share advices.

. YouTube -
Upload screencasts of your product

. Conferences -
That's the best place to meet bloggers. Hang around with your company (funny) t-shirt, hat, something that attract the attention of the people. That's a good ice-breaker to start talking to people.

. Startup Competitions -
That's the best way to go to techcrunch or important blogs. Participate in startup competition. You don't need to win; just with the participation you'll see the name of your company in the major blogs.

All these thing won't probably be enough to be featured on the NYT, but they will certainly spread out the name of your company/product. At least, it worked quite well in my case.
In local usage, "Jugaad" is used like "Hustle". Both have a class component and imply getting things done in the face of difficulty. The difference is that Jugaad is less likely to involve something illegal.
Very fair but I think the point of this conference is that hackers can learn business and then do other stuff and buy a Ferrari if they want to.

Business people can't learn technology so guess who holds the power?

(Although I don't believe people are put on earth to be rich. That would of course be crass).
Implemented this change after a little more thought. Sorry if I offended anyone.
I was just commenting to a friend of mine recently how Yahoo is doing all sorts of cool stuff but doesn't seem to get any credit or credibility out of it.
If you like what you see here, please consider voting for my SXSW panel. I'll be covering this and more, including proportion and color: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/6261
I know Twitter wants to have maximum trackability and extensibility for shortened links, but I think the best way to do it would be to offer a secondary API to sites that have their own identifiable shortlink domain.

Instead of just building in the tweet button, a site could hook into a Twitter shortlink API, which would let Twitter run its analytics and implement future functionality while the site continues to generate URIs through its own youtu.be, flic.kr, etc. domain.
Continuing Education in the Fitness Industry
I believe buyers need an Amazon account or Amazon FPS account to use Amazon FPS. How about an alternative to just accept CC# like Paypal's Website Payments Pro? (without needing a separate internet merchant account)
> I am interested to know if you had other examples in mind when you said this. Disclaimer: not trying to start a discussion on languages, or lang war.

I'm not sure why you'd want to disclaim trying to start a discussion on languages; it seems like a good thing.

The sentence I wrote was originally intended just to describe TeX, but it seemed to me in retrospect that it applied almost as well to Lisp. Although the design philosophies of the two languages are completely different, both are intended to be the foundations for lots of little languages; Knuth has said that he was always surprised that people were happy to settle so quickly on TeX and LaTeX, rather than creating and selecting among many more specialised dialects. (Of course, a quick glance at CTAN shows that it is folly to think that everyone who uses TeX or LaTeX does the same thing with it!)

I posted some more examples of highly customisable little languages at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1535807, but I should mention that I haven't used them.
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I can't comment on backbone technology, but it's common for network devices to provide Differentiated Services, which is a traffic-type classifier and QoS system. They're needed to keep your FTP traffic from lagging your VOIP call. The only reason these wouldn't be used on backbones is if there's simply too much traffic to classify fast enough, but I don't think that's the case.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differentiated_services
I'm going to go out on a limb and say the most important advice you can give someone just starting out, is to just go out and release something.That you are going to make mistakes is almost a given, so why not make them as quickly as possible
Smartphones lead mobile sales, Android moves into no. 3 spot
Thank you for the quick and authoritative response! I use wireless full-time so am stuck with SSL, Hopefully it is just a matter of time!
Omniture is rather expensive and somewhat difficult to use. Scalability won't be a problem with either.

A more fundamental decision point is understanding what kinds of information you want to track:what metrics are important to you? You're at much greater risk of having an analytics package that doesn't help you answer meaningful questions in an actionable way than having one that won't scale. Google "pirate metrics for startups" for a little more insight.

Also, you may want to explore one of the several "alternative" metrics packages, those that are better turned to funnel analysis or whatnot than either GA or Omniture seem to be.
Oracle's Updated Enterprise Pack for Eclipse Aimed at Java Jocks
Microsoft Lays Out Its 'Open Cloud' Vision
The counts are waaay off. I'm using tweetmeme for one of my sites, and while that shows 150 tweets for one page the Twitter widget shows 11
In Atlanta, there are gangs stealing A.C. units from outside offices for the $50 worth of copper wiring they contain!
Hindi has three - tu, tum and aap. I explained some of this on my Hindi lessons site - http://hindipedia.com/hindi-video-lesson-04-pronouns.
It's all fairly muddled: http://www.merchantequip.com/merchant-account-blog/1027/a-co....

I imagine PayPal gets the worst rep because of its larger user base - though I could be wrong. Google Checkout has some horror stories, too.

One of the last times this was discussed, a YC-funded start-up was mentioned: http://ycombinator.posterous.com/need-to-process-payments. I haven't seen nor heard anything about it, and it's US-only, but maybe pg can give us the inside scoop on the progress.
The government has massive liabilities precisely equal to it's massive assets. I could loan myself $100 billion dollars, and then claim I own $100 billion in assets. But if I earn $25,000 and my expenses are $35,000, I'm still broke.
Not much on that link - this has more: http://github.com/clojure/clojure/blob/1.2.x/changes.txt
It seems to have been out for a while. Does anyone have any experience with FPS? I'm launching a new project soon and the one thing left is payment processing. I'm scared to be tied to just PayPal and am looking into Google Checkout and Amazon as well.

I know, I know, just get a merchant account. And I will. But this is not really a startup or company and much more of just a small idea I'd like to test out. Ideally, if it picks up steam, I'll switch over to a real merchant account.
Possible Mistake in Schneier's Cryptography Engineering?
Tech Editor Suggests Self for New HP CEO: What's the Worst that Could Happen?
The false positives are one problem with PayPal; the customer support is another.

Customer support only gets a chance to prove itself once something goes south, and I get the impression that it's unequivocally bad.

If I am looking at buying a laptop, I don't care much about whether it's a matter of "if" or "when" it breaks, but how the customer service and repair shop handle it once it happens.

PayPal's "customer service" is the Damoclean sword that people fear moreso than the false positives. Because good customer service would be able to ameliorate most of their mess and admit errors on their end.
Although it might be a creative way to promote your panel, it earned a downvote. Just don't think it's the appropriate place to promote it.
Tips On Buying (web) Design
What this is actually saying is don't use Garamond for copy text as its not designed for current DPI's that are currently used on monitors. It doesn't mean you can't use it for titles or headings or devices with a high DPI.
14 New StartUps Launch In Philly
Correct. The poor display of Garamond for copy text is used as a vehicle to discuss the relationship between medium and form. Garamond will look just fine in very large type.
San Francisco is challenging YOU to build them the best damn tourist app
http://i.imgur.com/DaLcV.gif
The Gervais Principle, posted here on HN, was pretty convincing:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881296
"Business people can't learn technology so guess who holds the power?"

What?! You really believe that? Maybe you should qualify the statement a little more or else, we could just as easily say:

Technology people can't learn business so guess who holds the power?

Personally, I feel the lines between business and technology are blurring more and more.
I think wondering whether Apple is a software or hardware company is not the best way to understand the issue. Apple sells devices (and marginally services) that allow you to do things, that's about it. It's not even about experience (I don't know what user experience means, when I go to Google Map, I don't want to have some kind of Magic™ experience, I just want to check some location), it's about having good tools for day-to-day or pro activities. And the merit of Apple is to make this tools so that the hardware interfere with the software and the software doesn't interfere with what Im am doing.
My wife is organizing a conference using a non-profit and is going through the same PayPal headaches.

This is extremely bad customer service. All PayPal has to do is (1) refuse to do business with non-profits or (2) present non-profits with an accurate description of what could happen (account freezing, etc.) before they sign-up. (Burying this in the terms of service doesn't count, by the way.) Customer service is as much about expectations as it is about delivering.
Another home run. I'm really taking a liking for Jason Baptiste's style.

Having said that, I'd be interested in more articles on how to gain traction. The last one (http://jasonlbaptiste.com/featured-articles/if-you-build-it-...) was incredible, and it definitely left me wanting more.

Thanks, Jason.
Ask HN: API for road incident (accidents, delays, etc.) data?
Does anyone know if there's a public-facing API for road incidents such as accidents, queues, etc.?
Can you explain that further? Here's my logic: if you're in the comments on this thread, you're presumably interested in this topic, and would like to learn more about it -> Many HNers go to SXSW, and would get a chance to learn more, should my panel be accepted -> I'm not famous, so getting help from interested people is my only chance at getting a panel accepted.
Awesome news for Travelers
They could actually exploit it as a business feature. Make the flic.kr domain point to Twitter's servers, who implement the shortening service, and allow the business users to view lots of interesting stats, in relation with tweets. Stuff the business on its own could never gather without access to Twitter's extensive database of tweets.

This way both win. Twitter could charge for it as well.
Alma Whitten might be uninformed. (Was this talk recorded? Do you have a link to it?) There are some options in the account UI that, if enabled, allow Google to do some analysis of your data.

Link directly to their help center:
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...
> but the reality is your looking at an imprecise estimate of an imprecise estimates of a highly random event it's really vary random after the first digit.

Your assertion would be more convincing if your anecdote was had variance in the second position. Instead, it has variance in the third position (1065 and 1090) and less than half a unit in the second position (6877 and 6725)

The murder/manslaughter numbers are varying by 4-6x as much. (5.1 to 5.3/5.4)
You're welcome josh :). I sincerely love writing this stuff (more than startups themselves sometimes). I was thinking of doing separate posts on PR, Marketing, etc. for startups. Some I know myself and that which I don't I'd heavily research further. Open to suggestions.
Carol Bartz on Managing
> Can you explain that further?

Here's a stab: The culture here is such that comments are for the sake of the readers and not the writer. Some amount of self-promotion is fine, but too much is not appreciated.
> I'd pay for analytics...

You could just take how much you'd pay for analytics and buy some ads. :-)
I want my volume buttons to always be volume buttons. I don't know if that's an unreasonable way of looking at the world or not. Having the ringer on/off switch helps but there are lots of times when you're wearing headphones that a sudden burst of loud sound (either on a call or un-normalized MP3s) is very uncomfortable. I don't want my SmartPhone to cause me pain.
JQuery Lint
A quote my father:

"Most ideas with an NDA attached aren't ones worth hearing."

IP is paper armor for most startups - you're advantages are going to come from things related more to execution than any sort of legal ecosystem.
This is the identity page for Yahoo! user: https://me.yahoo.com/melleryopenid

For further information, visit http://openid.yahoo.com.

Huh?
Ask HN: good at programming, but seem to have lost interest
I currently have a job with a big company with a decent income. I do my job pretty well, but it is clear that I lack initiative and could be more proactive. I can implement and build things fast, solve complex bugs and problems, but all I want is to get it done - I don't do anything extra to make it better, or find out if what I am asked to do makes any real difference, or find new things I could work on to make an impact.

Over the years I have sort of lost interest in technology. I know enough to do my job well, read hn and news and stuff, but that's about it. I don't try out new things. I have an attitude that it is mostly just the same 1s and 0s that I can figure out if I really want to.

I am actually going to join a startup for a lot less pay soon, but I am just joining for the experience, hoping a change of environment might help with my general apathy. I am not sure though.

Anyone else has this feeling, and how did you resolve it?
It's interesting to show a picture of Kevin Rose in this article without mentioning him beyond one paragraph. I re-read the article trying to find which "checkboxes" allowed Digg to raise so much money.
"I don't think it's a far cry to say Jobs is a consumer product hacker and a bit of a market hacker."

Exactly. Apple isn't really about winning or losing; they're rewriting the game. Does it really get more "hackerly" than that?
> Business people can't learn technology so guess who holds the power?

That's incredibly obtuse thinking. Becoming a successful entrepreneur is not as simple as 'learning business'.

While some of the best entrepreneurs are hackers at heart because they think outside the box, many hackers are not entrepreneur material, they'd rather be tinkering with stuff that interests them, and for many hackers, business doesn't.
Isn't it funny? The idea that you could spend you entire professional career at, say, GM, retire at 65, and live out your years on a comfortable pension + social security, seems so amazingly quaint and outdated. I can hardly believe that that was the universal expectation in this country just a few short decades ago, but my elders insist it was true. Nobody in my peer group (millenials, I think we're called) seriously thinks they are going to see any of the money we are paying into social security. Pension? What's that again?

On the other hand, the expectation that we are going to be working forever seems to have made us dwell a lot more on what job fulfillment actually means, which is probably a good thing--not too many people I know are willing to put up with the sort of "deferred happiness" model that prevailed in earlier generations.