skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Big and risky business has always been paid for by big money. Trading voyages were big business and were limited in the number available. There were not millions of ships setting sail everyday.

The risk and cost factor in websites is rapidly reducing. As the risk reduces, so will the need to go to people dedicated towards giving money. It will be easier to raise money locally and in your environment, as has been done for a long time.

In human society, it's my observation that there are two types of capital being raised:

-- Risky and big money: These is the type of money that gets raised from venture capitalists nowadays and from rich dudes back in the shipping days

-- Less risky and smaller money: This type of money is raised from savings, bank loans and borrowed from family.

Websites and many of these simple technology things are rapidly moving out of the first category and into the second category. Cost is dropping and risk is dropping. Things like robots or electric cars are now in the first category.
Where do you find fixed-bid web projects you can bid on for 25K? Do you have a go-to website, or connections with people who will solicit your bids?
What about phonegap-driven apps? Will the normal javascript mixpanel integrate with it?
1) I hope the final product will be OSS

It absolutely will.
Business always needs investment. These private investors you got investment from, did they know your family already?
What are people's thoughts on peer-to-peer startup funding? Is it ever going to happen?

By that I mean raising money with a larger number of smaller inputs from a marketplace or similar. Potentially still in exchange for equity though also possibly for debt or just belief, as with Kickstarter.

Diaspora and Kickstarter are a recent successful example, though that was something of a black swan event in my opinion.

I do think this type of exchange could solve some of the things founders dislike about raising money, but it certainly raises other problems.

I heard a while ago of a company called Sprowtt planning to do something like this, but researching again just now, they appear to have "hit the deadpool" http://www.crunchbase.com/company/sprowtt-marketplace
Without venturing a personal opinion on affairs, there seem to be a few popular beliefs in certain people (e.g., Bruce Ivins, David Kelly, DC Madam, Hunter S Thompson) being suicided.
A roommate of a good friend makes a very good living doing this. I'd guess he must be holding many tens of thousands of dollars of tickets at any one time, and significant effort goes in to acquiring the tickets in the first place.
For a safer gambling idea, split it into a number of bets on different sports matches that are all really shit odds (like 1-3 odds), you've got a decent change that they'll all win, and if they don't you'll almost certainly still have some left (if not more than you started) because you split it. Repeat until you hit the magic number.
Funny that the author's name was also Joe Clark.

Joe Clark defeated Trudeau to become Prime Minister in 1979, and then lost to Trudeau in 1980.
This would be huge as now Outlook uses the shitty Word html engine for some reason. Hopefully, the next version of Office will get this!
I'll bet that Assange will be found dead after a "mugging" soon...
"but so far a year long undercover investigation has yet to prove there is an elite cabal of liberals desperately manipulating information in an attempt to skew towards their viewpoint."

That's just because their better at it than the Cons. Cue music from the Twilight Zone....
What OSS licence will you guys be using?

I was planning on spending the weekend holed up coding Django anyway so I will put my hand up to own a feature!
I actually don't prefer fixed-bid projects and I wouldn't attempt to do such a large one in such a short amount of time. But I live in Boston which has a nice startup scene and people approach me to build web applications for their startups.

I've been meaning to build a go-to website for about half a year now, but I've been too busy with client work--they find me without the website, often through the Boston Ruby Group.
Around here, that $480k would buy a 100 year-old 1,200 sq. ft house on 20 acres of land with a few outbuildings and have about $200k left over for toys.

For me that would be life-changing: no mortgage and the ability to do whatever I felt like.
Nobody has come up with a user-comprehensible abstraction to represent the machinery needed to represent the chain of actors needed to assert that "this is really Bank of America". Instead, we wound up with a buried configuration box that says "Verisign is God.

Isn't this a good thing?
I'm not sure its possible to represent the mechanism in any other way that doesn't involve actually having to teach users about how SSL works.
Remove root login over ssh and disable password logins and you are good to go. If you want to get fancy Google for ssh port knocking.
To be fair, Zune has sold many millions of units and is profitable. It hasn't dominated the market, but it's not very accurate to call the Zune a "big time" failure.
There is zero advantage to making several bets at the same time. So really what your suggesting is to make a series of bet's until you reach your desired goal. Unfortunately with most bet's the expected value is less than 1 so the more bets you make the higher your expected losses.
I read the first couple of paragraphs thinking that this was an op-ed by the former Prime Minister. It wasn't until I came across the word "apeshit" that I began to wonder.
What was the idea you submitted?

Actually as I recall more accurately it said that Google Storage was a prerequisite, so I signed up for that and still have yet to get in
I am trying to think of any cause of death for Julian Assange that would not create a virulent and permanent conspiracy theory. Can't think of one.
OSCON 2010: Karen Sandler, "Free Software on Medical Devices: Unchain My Heart"
Bradley Manning is not being held outside the country, and if you don't have that fact right, I'm guessing you don't have the facts on his legal representation either.
So the answer is SF, DC, and NY. Call me shocked.
Hmmm. I suspect that would break 90% of web pages on the web. On the other hand, people would make their pages valid pretty quick. :-)
How SEOmoz was built
Don't forget Vince Foster.
You are prescribing to one protocol versus another though. Whereas Schmidt is saying ALL video protocols be treated one way and ALL voip protocols be treated another way. For example, RTMP+MMS+RTSP+others may be considered "video," whereas SMTP+SMTP SSL+POP3 SSL+IMAP+IMAP SSL+others would be "mail," H.323+SIP+others will be "voice," and HTTP+HTTPS+FTP+FTPS+SFTP would be treated as "web." That is very different than pitting MMS against RTSP and saying MMS wins because Microsoft pays more.
Please cite your sources. According to Wikipedia he is being held in Quantico.

We only have Assange's word that he is being denied an attorney. I am sure the DoD are following their rules and if he has not already will eventually be assigned a JAG lawyer. He is not a civilian and he won't be treated as such.
You don't have showdead on, I guess. He's actually replying to a dead response by martygood, not the link by gojomo.
Whoops, messed up my entry on that poll, but I'm available any time between August 15th and September 6th. Look forward to this!
IPhone/mobile web app development: stand-alone or complementary?
I think your google point is spot on. I wanted to stay away from this and thought that the content creation route might help mitigate this.

Would you agree that there are three types of online businesses:

1. Businesses that rely on engineering(twitter, Facebook, google). These are businesses that you for sure want to stay away from.

2. Businesses that are basically e-commerce. Zappos, Amazon, etc. This would be tough to do because of the need for inventory.

3. Content businesses lifehacker, wine library, etc. These are ideal because they require little/no capital and only hand work put in by the students. This handwork can then spread over 4 years and hopefully they have something at the end of 4 years to show for it.

As far as home runs vs bunts and thinking they would all be successful, I'd be happy with 1% success rate.

Thanks for the awesome input.
Considering the number of people that can accomplish anything useful with HTML vs the number of people that can accomplish anything useful with C (or even XML), it's well in line with my expectations.

It's fairly easy to get a simpler implementation by shifting complexity from the parser to the user. But from a "total society productivity" standpoint, having a handful of developers spend a few months to implement a resilient parser is a cheap price to pay to have umpteen million people save hours of debugging for every page they create.
Is there an unfulfilled opportunity in creating bond-type instruments for investment in startups/businesses that may never get acquired or to the public market? Many founders don't want to exit, or don't intend to (37Signals would be a marquee example), but it is getting easier and easier to make some significant amount of revenue from smaller and smaller niches. It is just less likely, in those small niches, to create a big company, and there are a limited number of acquirers who can acquire successfully.
One of the nice things about the web is that all websites still work. Here is the first webpage: http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/T... That one wouldn’t work with a strict parser (look at the source: it uses the header tag instead of the head tag).

Breaking half or more of all the websites out there wouldn’t exactly be what I would call the “spirit of the www”.
I read this this morning here:

http://harpers.org/archive/2010/08/hbc-90007466

> He appears to have been denied access to independent counsel and held incommunicado outside the country.
It doesn't take an extremist group to game digg.

Before Digg went to their new format, I made a bot that upvoted or downvoted stories in C# in just a couple hours. I haven't dug around their new format yet, but I imagine it is equally easy to game too...
Wrong. Wrong, and Wrong. Plenty of people - all over the world including myself - can use threads (and python threads) perfectly well understanding their limitations. It does benefit our applications just fine.

That said, this GIL drum does get old.
Check out my reply to your sibling, I read it in Harper's this morning.
Android Explosion: 6 New Products That Aren't Smartphones
Our stock in the startups we've funded is worth a lot on paper. I've never tried to calculate how much. But I wouldn't be surprised if e.g. the Dropbox stock alone is worth more than we've invested to date.

The reason we raised money is that we've only been doing YC for 5 years (during the first of which we only funded 8 companies), and big exits usually take longer than that.
>Specifically, we are not entitled to perform summary executions

Obama authorizes assassination of U.S. citizen:

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/04/07...

"No due process is accorded. No charges or trials are necessary. No evidence is offered, nor any opportunity for him to deny these accusations..."
Harpers is also wrong. Not shocking. Harpers: often great writing, rarely great reporting.

Manning has been at Quantico for (at least) almost a week now.
Personality assassination is more likely.
Based on what I'm hearing from folks in Redmond, WP7 is top priority right now. I honestly think they'd push back the schedule on Windows 8 for it. I don't think many middle managers are able to tell the WP7 team, "you're not important... I'm focused on my enterprise customers". I think it would be escalated to Ballmer, Sinofsky, and the guy who runs Office.
Personally I find them hard to read without any padding and it is much easier to read tables when they have alternating colors (I think some people like to call them zebra tables).

That is about it though, just a nitpick with my tastes.
All righty, I'll take your word for it. I trust you more than even a well-known magazine, for better or worse.
you could start up a delivery food biz with that kind of capital? (Honest question, I don't know) - I think there's a market for good delivery or take out food that's open late here in silicon valley... The place is crawling with overpaid Engineers who can't cook and aren't expected to stumble in to work until noon, and yet nearly everything closes at 9pm.

Now, I haven't jumped on the idea just 'cause I know jack shit about cooking or restaurant management, but if you could seriously start up for twenty five grand, I'd be looking around for such a business to invest in.
Assange is just a glorified spin doctor. He is not a spy, he is not a black hat hacker(at least nowdays) and may not even be a criminal.

The govt simply need to ensure that Manning 2.0 does not happen. They can do that by making sure that the rest of Manning's life is very unpleasant.

Assange has already alienated so many people that I don't think he will be getting as much leakage in the future.

For example, if a Sgt in the Army has documents which state that the Army is improperly disposing of munitions and they are poisoning a local towns water supply. It is unlikely he would now go to Wikileaks - they are an organization which may have put him in danger, put his friends in danger and leaked classified documents to the world during a time of war.
You're right.

I think after the first year of wordpress/community sites you put them in groups and let them come up with the ideas themselves and they'll learn whatever is relevant to their project.
Doh! (smacks self upside head). :-)
Before any movement in this direction is made, Assange would have to be neutralized - the documents leaked would be evaluated, procedures changed and steps taken so that said documents become as harmless as conceivably possible.

As for pointing fingers, Wikileaks is assumed to have access to documents about private companies. Any minor player could be blamed for any evil that reaches him and his close associates that, by now, must be known by everybody interested.

The world is not a spy novel, but Assange is not safe. He is one border away from being locked up forever.
Curious, how do you know MS isn't doing exactly what you said? How do you know that project isn't called WP7?

Ballmer may be doing a Jobs. "Nobody reads anymore"... well not until I release iBooks that is.

At this point there is so little reason to play their tablet hand if it is WP7. They already have 3rd parties working on apps. The only thing they'd get is scrutiny.

Update: This is basically exactly what the TechFlash article referred to in another comment says.
They do not cite any sources. I think they are just repeating that Assange said.
Chessmetrics developer, Jeff Sonas, on how he became interested in chess ratings
Your logic is correct.

It really depends on what you meant: whether you wanted to mean that 100K is 1) reasonable or 2) unreasonable.

You said: "Now I am not saying that you should be paying yourself 200K a year out of the gate, but I do not think anything under 100K is unreasonable."

"Now I am not saying that you should be paying yourself 200K a year out of the gate" --- (1)

"but" --- (2)

"I do not think anything under 100K is unreasonable." --- (3)

(1) implies that you think that he shouldn't overpay himself, and you followed that with a "but" (i.e. (2)), which suggested that the ensuing clause was going to be of the "you shouldn't underpay yourself either" nature/implication.

Naturally, the next clause should be explaining what exactly you meant by underpaying. So that means you should either be setting a lower bound and saying that it's reasonable, i.e. "I think that anything above 100K is reasonable," or be setting an upper bound and saying that it's unreasonable, i.e. "I think that anything below 100K is unreasonable".
Don't take my word for it; the AP reported this on July 31.

Manning is in serious shit. The crazier this Wikileaks stuff gets, the worse it's going to get for him. It's hard to hyperbolize the possible consequences at this point.

Part of the reason for that is that it's very easy to characterize the crime that he's alleged to committed.

Assange, on the other hand, probably hasn't committed any "crime" at all.
Its missing the social aspect right now - I can't find anyone (much less my friends).
In my browser at work (IE7) on a 1024x768 resolution, your feedback button on the left covers your tagline (specifically the words 'easily,' 'automatically,' and 'effective.')
I would not classify Kim Philby or Robert Hanssen as whistleblowers. Of course both of them traded secrets to their sworn enemy for money. This is a much different situation than releasing secrets to the public out of a desire to uncover improper government lies. In fact other than the release of secrets, the situations are very different, your analogy is a strawman.

As for whistleblowing: Shawn Carpenter, Peter Buxtun, and Wendell Potter have all received that label, while not informing on their bosses about illegal activities, just reprehensible ones. There are plenty more.
Google docs you can regularly backup to a shared drive, translating tags to folders.

Gmail you can back up over IMAP.

Maps and search, yeah, we're dependent, but those are ongoing projects. Neither as they exist today will be much use in the future. (Much more so for search.)
The clj-stacktrace third-party lib does a much better job of this. I have hopes that it can be merged into Clojure in the future. (Not in 1.2 though; it's already in RC-stage.)
F.C.C. Chief Opposes Fees for Internet Priority
As suggested by all the posters suggesting straight up gambling, I think that doing this reliably; doubling your money in one month, is going to be pretty difficult.

As I was saying before, if you have some special skill to add to the mix, that helps a lot (remember, a top end SysAdmin around here can earn $14K/month contracting, before taxes and stuff, so you wouldn't be doubling the money in a month in that case, you'd be adding 50% value, still damn good, and paying yourself a good wage.)

The thing is, doubling your money in a month is a what, 1200% annual return? no, it's more, if it compounds monthly, quite a lot more. You can bet that any investment with even a small chance of that kind of return gets all kinds of money thrown at it, to the point where those niches where this sort of thing is possible are filled right quick.

But yeah. Maybe you can pull that off for one month (hell, if you really hustled, and billed out at top end rates without a recruiter, you can make twenty five grand consulting as a SysAdmin. I mean, I couldn't... I've gotten that kind of hourly rate for short gigs, but I lack the sales skills to do that for a whole month.) but doubling that fifty grand the next month? doing it again? yeah, your odds start looking more and more like a day at the races.
Yeah, his situation is certainly unfortunate... and highlights the need for concealing sources.

It's certainly interesting to see our increasingly international, distributed world. The old is trying to adapt to the new, and there's always going to be growing pains. That article where that guy claimed we should kidnap Assange was pretty funny; but also kind of scary. It's sort of amusing (in a morbid sort of way) that people feel we should impose our laws on people that aren't even our citizens, but then things like ACTA happen (or will happen, in its case) and it's not that funny any longer.
Restrictions on port 22 are NEVER overkill. In fact, you should run another port entirely.
The author suggests minimalism is trending upward, but I haven't seen this. What gets called "minimalist" is often still full of ornament and unnecessary complexity.

e.g look at all the weird curves on Dell's current desktops - those curves are all ornamental.
Better make that 128,864,881: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1578848
Well, I'm using it for few years now and UI is confusing, it got better, but still confusing. Conceptually, it's a mess: wall-to-wall, message, feed, notification, boxes. Visually, well, it's just doesn't look that nice. And why or why do they show events that I already declined?
The accusation that Obama might authorize the extrajudicial killing of Julian Assange is impossible to refute, and thus very boring to discuss. But very few people outside of the right wing fever swamps would draw a direct equivalence between Assange and an active, productive member of Al Qaeda.

(The argument about whether al-Alwaki is or isn't part of Al Qaeda is even more boring than the argument about whether someone who posts embarassing things on the Internet might be killed).
I'm wondering if we used to read the whole articles back in the day? He started wandering around 3/4's of the way through and I was thinking wow this is pretty long compared to most blogs/articles - then I saw it was from 2000.
Ask HN: Who do you follow on Twitter?
It would be interesting to know who other HNers are following on twitter.
I got goose bumps!
My Top Idea
Deciding that invalid markup should work would be the wrong turn I alluded to.

It would have been very easy to drop all the back compat bs by saying "An HTML5 document is one that begins with the 6 bytes '<html5' and if the document is invalid, reject it. Anything else, parse however you want." Browsers that support HTML5 add text/html5 to the Accept header.
For exactly what crime?

These posts all read like bad spy thrillers. You can make up anything at all about what "documents" Wikileaks might have, and what forces might be lined up against him. The fact is, 5 years from now, probably the only fallout for him is that he'll have a hard time getting past customs in the US.
If you're already using key authentication, that doesn't add much security. A port is just a very short password shared by all users--- instead of logging in with "I'd like to login, please initiate public-key authentication", you now have to login with "I'd like to login, the magic number is 2222, and please initiate public-key authentication", which isn't really any more secure.
> javascript:alert(Heli.FPS=10);

obviously just swap 10 for your desired FPS
When it comes to software, the patent office's answer to that is essentially "no". Pass it through, let the courts decide what to do with it, because they have no official measure to determine if it should be allowed or not.

Idiotic, but pragmatic, but surely they can use some common sense...
The Beginning of the iPad meme’s first up Motorola
> javascript:alert(Heli.FPS=10);
Use a new parser for new pages, the old parser for old pages. The introduction of H.264 didn't suddenly render all older formats unplayable. Why can't a new markup format coexist with older formats, too?
Ask HN: How are ads handled for email newsletters?
I'm in the early phases of starting an email newsletter (CAN-SPAM compliant, opt-in, of course) and was wondering how ads were handled. You don't have the option of using Google Ads since they won't reach into email for small fry operators.

My hunch is to charge based on views and to collect metrics on clicks. My question is twofold. Are there services into which you can plug for ads? If not, is it reasonable to simply write a Rails app, for example, that registers the click and redirects to the client's web site? (I'm thinking the url for each ad contains an ad ID and possibly a user ID).

I've exhausted my Google-fu on this one. I'm just looking to avoid pitfalls and find existing solutions as much as possible.

Thanks in advance!
I think it was about the same, 30-something million. Peter Theil made about twice as much from the PayPal sale though.