skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Think marketing is manipulative? Why we need MORE marketing that actually works
I've noticed that some people think marketing is bad/dirty/manipulative -- that facts alone should persuade people to change their behavior. But actually, this rarely works. We need MORE, BETTER marketing. I've written a long essay about how this works with personal finance and politics, but it's also relevant to tech startups.
Let’s Celebrate Google’s Biggest Failures
Ask HN: What's your favorite HN moment?
Something about the Future of Startup Funding discussion (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1579092) reminded me of my favorite HN moment. It was a while back and it was only a brief exchange, between sanj and cperciva:

Did you win the Putnam?

Yes, I did.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35015

It's still funny to this day. What's your favorite HN moment?
Getting the Early Stage Job of Your Choice
You can also use MongoHQ directly if you want, from Heroku.

I described the steps here:

http://blog.logeek.fr/2010/6/29/sinatra-heroku-mongodb-mongo...
I was commenting to my wife the other day that while JoC does not seem to be written for complete beginners, that fact is actually a very good thing. There is a lot of Beginning Clojure / Beginning Lisp / etc. material out there. What I really wanted was a book for those who have already seen the light, so to speak, of Lisp. I've read The Little Lisper. I've read Lisp 1.5 Manual. I've written a Lisp interpreter in C. And so on. I'll use Lisp as long as I am still allowed to do so (I'm a grad student, so no issues yet!).

So I love Lisp and I love Clojure for being a new Lisp.

JoC talks directly to me. It references works and people I know about, but most of which I do not know enough about. It talks about how amazing Lisp is but tells me even more than I already knew. Much more. It's written as if the authors are saying, "Yes of course Lisp and Clojure are great, but here are all the reasons WHY." For example, the section "nil Pun With Care" is obviously written for someone who knows the variations on 'nil' found in different Lisps. JoC's style is similar to Rich Hickey's famous presentations ("Yes, nil is different in Clojure... ok, let's just get through this slide, you knew we'd have to at some point...").

JoC really takes Lisp appreciation to the next level. I was waiting for something like this!
A lot of these look really good, much better than previous TechStars batches.
In a rolling round, is each investment negotiated at a different price? Or does the company sell X shares at Y price, first-come, first-served? The former sounds like a lot of work; the latter gives people an incentive to delay even more (they'll have made an investment with more information than the prior investors. And, of course, they'll have cash on hand in the interim.)
I believe convertible notes still have some far-off due date, and they are accruing some nominal interest rate. So at some point, the money comes due if never converted (and the company is still in business).

If the company reaches a point where it will need no outside capital (nor pursue acquisition/IPO), it could have a 'round' that simply converts the debt to equity at some agreed-upon value. Then, perhaps, the original investors can at least start the capital-gains clock, collect dividends, sell shares on a private market, etc.
You can do pretty neat things with indexes and regexp queries. The mongo-search project is also pretty cool (does Porter stemming, indexing, etc).

That said, if you need powerful "full-text searching" I would look to something like Lucene or Xapian.
Sometime in the future I expect to see this same type of posting about Twitter and Digg.
I am so amazed by how frequently people come up with the same idea. I have been thinking about making an office hour app 7-8 months ago and been talking to everyone I know for feedbacks. Fail on me for not being able to execute it sooner. Good job for taking the initiative, guys.
Oops, I lost my longer answer in a power outage. The short answer is that I only speak English and Spanish fluently, and Spanish only because I've been living in Argentina since 2006. I can get by in Portuguese and French under some circumstances, and my Japanese is sufficient to make Japanese people giggle before they talk to me in English.
This recently-posted article has a lot of details:

http://venturehacks.com/articles/no-lead

If you're going to take 10s to 100s of thousands of dollars from private investors, there's no getting around having a lawyer with experience in such deals.
Well, according to the iron triangle, that also means slow. ;)
I think this will go down as one of PG's best and most predictive essays. It feels as if these changes are all just before the tipping point but close enough that they're going to happen; if they do, it'll be a huge positive for founders and the investors that adapt.
NexusOne/Arduino PhoneSat Satellite Launch Video
I don't really get it...
The ruling was only ~2 months ago and video games like Madden aren't simple. Maybe we'll see something next year.
I'm not thinking about doing this myself. The very idea of looking for co-founders among strangers seems absolutely bonkers to me.

I am just interested that there appears to be a mini-industry springing up to serve people that have this fantasy. It suggests to me that we now have a new set of cultural myths about entrepreneurship, to some extent created by this very website.

Consider how many fortunes are made selling the old image of entrepreneurship. Books with titles like "Millionaire's Mind". They make the elementary mistake of assuming that if one emulates the characteristics of successful people (or organizations), this will lead to one's own success.

For example, Jim Collins has made his entire career out of telling people how to emulate successful organizations. He observes that great (or greatly profitable) organizations, like Microsoft, have all set themselves what he calls a Big Hairy Audacious Goal, such as "A computer on every desk and in every home". And pretty soon the accounting departments at fourth-rate retailers are taking weekend retreats to ask themselves what their "BHAG" is.
MongoDB has a single, global read/write lock for the entire database. So when a write is actually processing, nothing else can happen. In a moderately write-heavy environment, a single slow write can result in pretty bad performance in my experience. Reads can happen at the same time, although there have been problems with not yielding the lock on scans, although there are changes in 1.6 to address that.
Google seems to be trying to roll out account switching across all their services. I noticed a few weeks ago that it gave me an option to log in to Google Docs using either my Google Apps powered college email address or my normal gmail account, when both cookies are set as logged in. However, with Google docs there are a few bugs, for instance it seems to log me in to Google docs with my college email address but when I actually click a document it tells me that I don't have permission to access it.
Repeat after me,

"I will never make any money beyond a salary working for somebody else. My only chance at striking it rich is by being a founder in my own company, or getting lucky in the lottery (or (casino, inheritance, getting run over by Jason Calcanis' Tesla, etc)."

Every once and a while there's a statistical outlier like Youtube where employees actually cash out with enough money to feel like they're not poor in San Francisco. I think Youtube was the last one, in what, 2005?
Floating point cannot represent money.

It shouldn't. But you would be amazed how much bad code there is out there. A lot of it just uses floating point arithmetic because it is easy. (Actually for Monte Carlo simulations it isn't even a bad idea. There speed matters over precision.)

(Furthermore you get fun issues when you add in the complication of having multiple currencies that vary against each other.)
God, this is going to save my marriage.
I agree that the YC application is useful per se and not just as a route to funding -- in that respect it was a bad choice of example, but it was the example of funding application paperwork which people here are most familiar with.

But I still think that investors will need to compete not only on how quickly they can decide to fund a startup but also based on how much effort it takes to apply -- with the important difference that in the first case investors will notice if they lose ("sorry, you took too long to get back to us, and we've already got all the investors we need for this round") and in the second case investors will simply never see the deals.
English mothertongue, German at a conversational level and it's steadily improving though writing is still a pain, Irish and French were both pretty good about 9 years ago but are goddamned rusty. I can still read both of them pretty well though expressing myself at all, whether in speech or writing is torture.
"it's usually the invaders who win." Let's aim, launch & invade!
Lots of great ideas there. A few were a little too narrow for my tastes, but best of luck to everyone.
Right around the time I started reading Hacker News, there was this post: "How I Hacked Hacker News (with arc security advisory)"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=639976

After reading that, I figured it'd be worth sticking around to learn a few things!
In someway it worries me that there are so little of these jobs apparently, bit of a lottery ticket to get such a challenge.
The problem is that the prospectus is a legal document. When you run legal documents through the legal process, you often get indeterminate answers. How much liability should the bond packager/issuer have if their simulation accurately reflects their understanding of the agreement, but a court decides that their understanding was incorrect?
Doesn't anyone think that we elect politicians to decide precicley such things as whether there should be net-neutrality or not, rather than leave it to massive corporations to decide in their own interest.

All it takes is one sentence

No content should be prioritized by any internet service provider.

Hmm, maybe someone should make a Facebook page with that sentence. I hardly use Facebook myself, but seeing as this issue is quite in focus, it would probably get traction with some promotion and then you can get a newspaper saying 24,000 people have joined a facebook group called...
The dupe detection is a simple string comparison. Any character differences will allow the dupe to be posted - even differences like trailing slashes.
Bundle Hunt reveals a treasure trove of spectacular design goodies 
Bundle Hunt is a premium resource pack aimed at empowering the creative community, offering more than $1,400 worth of outstanding apps, templates, icons, eBooks, hosting plans and premium memberships, all for less than $50. The design bundle will only be available for 14 days, from Aug. 2-16 and includes some of the most prestigious brands in the business.
By what standard? And to whom?
Hypertable Meetup @ Facebook
basically what robotadam said (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1579212).
To clarify: the database lock is actually for the whole process (-> all databases).
I had an especially bad experience with it before they introduced the yielding for long running operations. But even with the yielding, write heavy parallel things still suffer. Especially if your indexes ever get too big and the the system decides to swap in/out part of the index. I've seen 5-6 second inserts with hundreds of writes and reads piling up in the mean time (even without the swap part).

If only they had an equivalent of innodb as a storage engine, it would be awesome
HTML 5 != -webkit-proprietary extensions.

"Instead of animating standard CSS positioning properties like left, use -webkit-transform instead."
Rolling round is done with convertible notes. No valuation talks take place.

Convertible notes are loans that can be converted into equity if some predetermined event takes place (usually you raise another round of money or you get a buy out offer.)

You're not selling X shares at Y price. You're issuing a loan that may get converted into X shares. Every investor who gets these convertible notes usually will end up getting the same valuation in the future if the note converts to equity.

So with rolling round, you're just taking on debt. And you can take as much debt as you want to (unless you've added a clause in any of the notes that determines that you can't go over a certain amount of debt.)
Do you run either of those? We'd love to integrate as much as possible.
Adia - a week with Clojure and MongoDB
Ask HN:can you name me successful solo (one man) startup?
can you please give me example of one man start up that has succeed ?
I am between him and pg.

edit: I never imagined John McCarthy writing fiction... http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/robotandbaby/robotandbaby...
Getting Started with Django, episode 1 [video]
I don't, just throwing it out there. The creators shouldn't be hard to find though.

Anyway, I'll see if I can contribute some html/css/js work over the weekend :) see you all on irc!
Some people actually did fix epoll, benchmarked the results and concluded it wasn't worth it.

http://www.linuxinsight.com/ols2004_comparing_and_evaluating...
Yep - he has a good 30,000 ft view of what's going on that most of us (myself included) can't really perceive, only privy to bits and pieces of it.
"For entrepreneurs, reading business books is the new television"

Could not agree more with the author. Most of these books are just waste of time. There are few good business books, though, the ones that look at things though skeptic's eye, the ones that disillusion you. But even those books are probably not worth reading.

Moreover, most of these books were written by authors who have never done any significant business in their life.
Ask HN: Who is paying $25 a month for Mixergy?
A while back it was announced that interviews older than one week would be viewable by members only - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1140456.

I didn't think much of it until I was doing some research today and ran into this: http://mixergy.com/register-and-get-instant-access-Premium/

Is anyone else paying this? $25 seems like a ton of money if you just want to watch one interview. Plus, this landing page seems very info-commercial like and not at all what I would expect.
Sigh. http://www.alistapart.com/articles/prefix-or-posthack/
Yeh I started it at 30fps and it was nice and smooth, but as it got harder I needed to slow it down, 19fps was the slowest that didnt look terrible, just reminded me to fix up the code so I can speed up fps while slowing down the play, it was running 30fps with no problems or lag.
Post status to linked in with PHP oauth
I don't have regular office hours. I start work anywhere from 12-1pm and stop anywhere from midnight-5am. Sometimes I take days off. Sometimes I'm too busy to answer the phone. My schedule for something like this is pretty much unpredictable.

Proposal: rather than specifying hours, just let me specify here / gone like a regular IM client. If it looks like it's going to be a slow day, I'll turn on the tap, and if things pick up I'll turn it off.
Heh, I still remember the first notice (not DMCA, just German law) that made me drop the domain :)

Good luck!
Grabbing eyeballs with a blog
Fun to see these kind of maps, but they are pretty useless without a discussion of purchasing power in those areas. The Bay Area and Bos-Wash all have above average cost of living too...
Book discussion: What do you think of "Daemon" by Daniel Suarez?
The technologies described in the book are certainly not science fiction and well within our grasp at the present time, or achievable over the next decade. A question is how plausible is such an event scenario for the world we live in now, and the world of our children?
Rdio Gaga: How Spotify’s Inferior Rival Is Playing America Like A Violin
Interesting article. I'm not opposed to vendor prefixes by any means. Instead, I'm merely pointing out that the title is misleading. A -webkit CSS extension may at some point make it into a blessed spec, but describing it as HTML 5 in action is inaccurate.
Check out themeforest.net, which has tons of templates for any kind of site. The prices are incredibly reasonable.
[video] Chrome 5 vs IE 9 Platform Preview (almost not fair)
I'm a medical student, and I wouldn't want this forced upon me. If a school is going to give me $500 worth of equipment, let me decide what it will be; probably reference books or study guides.

In particular, I would not want this during years 1 and 2; perhaps in year 3 it would be useful if fully integrated into the patient database and order system.

This frankly seems like a gimmick. Stanford needs to implement grades in years 3-4 to become more competitive for residency. That would be a much stronger play to attract top students than this will be.
Apple Patent Application Uses 3rd Party App Screen as Example
Ebay - Pierre Omidyar,
Amazon - Jeff Bezos
See here for shipping rates and import fees for various countries:

http://android.brightstarcorp.com/help.htm
Agreed. I'd be more interested in seeing average salary by region contrasted with the average cost of living for those same regions, which would identify the most economical places to live in the US.
After I read this, I had to try it for myself
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/20...

MacBook Pro Specs
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.8 GHz
4GB Ram
NVIDIAGeForce 9600M GT 512MB (not used by chrome since it's all at the application level, no hardware acceleration)

AlienWare Specs
Intel Core 2 2.16Gz
2 GB Ram
GeForce Go 7600 256Mb

Microsoft is getting it's DirectX Big Guns and trying to give us a glimpse of what the web will be once every other browser will be doing hardware accelerated graphics. Google better make a move quickly to not loose momentum with chrome.
A few hundred thousand can easily be life-changing, especially at a young age. It means freedom to choose projects without drawing a salary, or at a below-usual salary, for many years. Even just socked away, it could mean an extra $million+ by retirement age. It could also be destructive -- if it encourages new addictions or other unsustainable increases in consumption. Either way, nothing to sneeze at.
Toronto HN Meetup 0b0010 - Let's pick a date and place
Hey everyone!

After receiving four emails asking when the next Toronto HN Meetup was, I took the hint. Use the below link to show your availability/time preference and suggest places/ideas in the comments. Once the voting has died down, I'll make a www.guestlistapp.com event for it.

http://www.doodle.com/dapvcixei57x84zx

If you missed the last one, you missed a night of beers, nerdery, and a noticeable abundance of coders/hardware hackers. About 50 people came in over the course of the evening, some as far away as Ottawa!

The last one was held at Sin and Redemption, but let's vote on where the next one should be in the comments.
Experience leads me argue that they are LESS educated now.

Look around on the web. Start paying attention to how many people consistently make basic linguistic errors like "loose" when they wanted to say "lose" or use the incorrect homophone for "there" or "it's" to indicate a possessive. Look for actual reasoning -- as opposed to pedantically regurgitating a collection of facts.

The sad reality is that getting a degree these days has become a lot easier, and increasingly has very little to do with how smart one is, but rather how skilled one is at cramming for a test.

The high demand and low supply in software developers has lead to both higher salaries and lower standards.
I personally would probably go higher than $1 per 1000 views, but then my CPM is higher than 0.6, but for $1 you can use adsdaq which allows you to set your own CPM price, but of course you would not get 100% fill up rate, but I would assume that even with a 30% fill up rate, if you can get ten pence more or 40 pence, it probably would be worth it.

I have no experience of such thing however, but I would at least try and ask for 1.2. You should remember that the 0.6 is through a middle man. And in any event the person would get back if they really want a deal and if they aren't really so keen then you hard loose much. So going for higher than you would be comfortable to settle with might be a good idea.

And congrats! 500k page views is quite an achievement!
Android's Trajectory World Domination 20% 5B Devices in 2012
At the explosive growth shown so far, it will not be long before they have 20% of the worlds market...
We both do front end and back end coding and design, and have the tools (and knowledge) needed to do it properly.

As advice from someone with experience, I would say do not expect to hit anything close to home run on your first attempt. It might be easier for you if you can find a front end that you like and do a screen capture as a jpg and try to build that verbatim using your own code. Then modify that code to do what you want. Dreamweaver might be a decent tool for doing this. You could pull all of the code and pics from a working site and rebuild that as your first model, but you can probably code it yourself quicker and better.

If you want to build from scratch, knowing how to use Photoshop or a similar tool might make your vision for the site easier to implement. Plus you can give the jpg you make to someone who can write code in your desired language and have it implemented by that person.

Anyone can build a webpage but, if you are trying to do this in Notepad or something similar, it is going to be a tough uphill climb, and you may never fully reach your desired goal. So make sure you have some good tools for the job.
I like this idea a lot. Maybe we'll have an option to go on the site and just say "mark me as available now". Would that be close enough?
I'm usually not securing my laptop at all, never had any issues. Starbucks, trains, barcamps, etc.

Hamburg and Berlin, Germany
Rolling round is done with convertible notes. No valuation talks take place.

that's not true, most of the convertible notes we're seeing include a valuation cap in them i.e. the investor never converts their debt at a valuation higher than the cap. the cap addresses the main criticism of convertible notes, namely they misalign the incentives of the founders (who want a high valuation for their next funding event) and investors (who want a lower valuation for the next round so they get more stock).
i'll be around this weekend, would love to help out. not much of a python guy but pretty well versed in MVC and can prob contribute on the design /js end of things as well
Moreover, when you start doing, you'll notice that most of the "knowledge" you've got from these business books is useless.

"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, in practice there is".
Europeans Realize Dream of a Single Charger for All Cellphones
Agreed as well, ratios would work well, even though there are fixed costs that are virtually identical across the country. Because of such expenses, a higher income in an expensive place may still have an edge over a lower income in a cheap place, if the ratio for the former is only slightly less than the ratio for the latter.
SittingO - Like an IMDb for the conference circuit
In most cases, where you're talking to investors simultaneously you do the note on the same terms for each investor.

The exception to this would be e.g. I intend to raise $150k, i get this amount of money in the bank and then more investors want to participate. I can bring them in but I could argue for a higher valuation since they're coming in once I have money in the bank i.e. at less risk than the investors who initially put in $150k and therefore deserve the lower valuation.

Other exceptions might be where an investor brings particular value that warrants a lower price e.g. you're working on payments and Max Levchin wants to invest
Teaching Teachers How to Teach