skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, this has potential. Here are some frustrations I had with the UI though:

I didn't "have a passphrase given to me" yet so I didn't know what to do from the homepage. The text "free and no sign-ups" in the corner needs to somehow be visible even without mouse hover, IMHO, otherwise visitors will think they need a beta passphrase to proceed.

This is supposed to be super-secure, but the password suggestion was "stone", which is very insecure.

There are too many options available (yes, even though there aren't that many :) Somehow, you need to organize the options into different "work flows" that are easier to understand. After clicking "create new jot" maybe you could show a menu with the following options:
1. High Security & For one recipient: Here's where you put the "phone" feature (and maybe other options where people can type in their email address, zip code, etc)
2. High Security & Lengthy Password: Here's you generate a super long/secure password for people (which they can replace with their own)
3. Low Security & Easy To Distribute: Here's where you suggest a password that's just a simple dictionary word

Those are my suggestions.
Cut your loses, reset your passwords and use a program called "your brain"

Serious, I am not being an ass. I remember all of my complex passwords for everything, no hackers can get to them, no hidden piece of paper in my office and no post-it note on my monitor.
Agreed, if you make the first offer you should only be going big. You think $10k is fair, offer $20k.

I remember my father-in-law was at a garage sale and saw a tub full of barely used golf balls (better than the ones they sell in walmart at a stupid price like $12 for 15). He asked 'how much?'; she offered $10, he countered with $5 and she took it. We counted them, it ended up being 300+ golf balls. He would have been more than happy to pay $1 a dozen and consider it a steal ($25 for all the balls - like $240 for worse condition balls in walmart) without the rubbermaid container; he got that for free.

You don't want to be the person selling your company for $50,000 when on the straight market it would be going for $500,000.
If youre looking at statistics you probably have no idea of what you're doing.

Information is alienated experience.

Try something diferent. Also: if you're doing the same that 95% of the people: you're doing it wrong.
Encouraging older people to apply could be valuable if in fact they do on average product better startups. I think the program, the up and moving to the bay area, the 3 months of building the startup out of an apartment, may deter older startup founders at first glance.
You said: For vacation only! You cannot use that for business.

Sorry to nit pick but it's always worth clarifying these issues if people might make decisions based on them.. You can use the VWP for business: http://travel.state.gov/visa/temp/without/without_1990.html

The Visa Waiver Program (VWP) enables nationals of 36 participating
countries to travel to the United States for tourism or business
(visitor [B] visa purposes only) for stays of 90 days or less without
obtaining a visa.

However, you cannot "work." Some things are explicitly allowed, though:

consult with business associates, travel for a scientific, educational,
professional or business convention, or conference on specific dates,
settle an estate, or negotiate a contract

Getting funding should fall under a valid B-1 usage as long as you're not doing any work but merely demoing/meeting people/thrashing out contracts. It would take a few words with the folks at your local US Embassy to nail that down though.
People in their 20s are much more willing to take risks and sacrifice comfort and social life for a great idea.

It is good when it was their own innovative business idea, and not so good, when someone else's one (look at politics!)
1. Get visa, go to U.S.

2. Start U.S. company

3. Find U.S. investors, notify them you won't be staying in the country for more than a few months

4. ??????

5. Profit
If not starting is a failure, then I failed a lot.

I have literally never had business go according to plan, which stands to reason, because for some unfathomable reason we plan before execution instead of after when we know the results. This has always struck me as wasteful.
You mean that when the buyer does a walk-through before signing a lease, he or she is not allowed to bring a tape measure?
Zero Point Columns
LLVM is being developed by someone that Apple hired, why would they keep contributing back? Why wouldn't they have closed the doors on that back before the project got bigger? It is not in their best interest to do so.

The OpenBSM implementation in FreeBSD is based on the BSM code in Darwin.

Submitted by Apple to FreeBSD (apple.com email addresses)

http://freshbsd.org/?branch=&project=freebsd&committ...
http://freshbsd.org/?branch=&project=freebsd&committ...

Apple, Inc:

http://freshbsd.org/?branch=&project=freebsd&committ...

Also, since all of this is BSD code, and those of us who developed under the BSD license agree to the fact that the code may be taken and used, and that works for us. Companies that know what is ultimately good for them will contribute back, maybe not all of their secret sauce so that they can continue to make money but at least part of it.
I started picking at Muchnick. From the look of it, it is almost all back-end stuff.

mouth waters
I believe the article is trying to point out that building a social media following is only valuable if there is a purpose besides just gaining followers/fans. Interesting read.
It's tough. What helps me is to step back and look at the problem objectively. Think about the situation is if it were happening to strangers and you were a disinterested observer. How should the problem be resolved?

When I'm in a situation like this, it also helps to think of myself as an "ambassador of reality". Basically, reality is sending a message to the business people. It's feedback saying "your assumptions about the market were wrong" or "you didn't plan thoroughly enough" or whatever the situation is. Reality just happens to be sending this message through you to them. If you don't ask for your money back, you're not giving them the proper financial feedback that they need to learn to be better businesspeople. For their next venture, you will have helped them learn that if you don't pay people they won't just go away and forget about it. You don't have to be aggressive or threaten legal action, you just have to be persistent and not go away. :)

If you need some inspiration, go watch the film Gandhi. He was always civil and friendly, but very stubborn. :)
No. The buyer absolutely can measure the exact area, and can probably do so with a children's plastic ruler, since as near as I can tell nobody rents office space anymore without looking at a PDF of a floorplan first.
Love the idea.

Take a look at http://www.merge.fm - they're doing something similar but making the barrier to entry trivial.

They're allowing normal people to interact with their favorite artists DURING the songwriting process. Who knows if it will gain widespread adoption, but it's an interesting approach nonetheless.
Bear in mind you don't have to "be acquired" to do well. You can, more easily, sell technology, domains, customers, information, or other business assets you produce to US (or non-US) companies.

Further, even if you don't live in the US, your sites can target US users just as any US site can. If you need to charge money, you'll need to figure out a billing system to accept $, but there are few compelling reasons to be in the US merely to serve users there (though depending on how you do it, the IRS may think otherwise).

All that said, if you look at and learn from American businesses and you have a good feel for your local market (or the Arabic market in general), you might even have a position most of us would envy! You can more easily "take" ideas that have been proven in the West and do an Arabic twist on them (I don't know about the Arabic world, but this tactic is common in non English speaking European countries).
In exactly what sense is commercial real estate an oligopoly?!
The "little things" involved in setting up a restaurant are in totality encyclopedic, and yet mom-and-pop teams start restaurants every day in the US.
Weights and measures are already regulated in the U.S. This is why, when you pay for a gallon of gas, you can be sure you are getting an actual, standard gallon of gasoline. This in itself doesn't seem to create a barrier to entry for gas stations and protects the consumer.
I am struggling with your definition of free will, here. I read that stub four times, and I fail to see how preconscious brain activity proves or denies the existence of rational, conscious decisions over choices? There's not enough detail in the article to explain what "preconscious activity" means in this case. Since nurture heavily influences all decision making, some part of the rational, conscious process of choice must consult memory (experience). Perhaps that's the preconscious activity? You don't think, "This time I will stand still while the bear runs towards me." The consequences of free will can't negate our survival as a species. That'd be dumb. So there has to be some sort of middle ground.

I read something years ago that stuck with me. Let me make it clear that my own beliefs on the existence of a sentient creator cannot be proven or denied. He wrote, "God could have made us just like himself. But he did not. Instead he made us imperfect and gave us free will." There's a lot implied about our purpose in that statement. There will be no unified theory that does not take into account why we so badly want a unified theory.
I imagine he's referring to the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Registration program, which is pretty blatantly targeted at Muslims (based on a quick glance, the only nation on the list that's not majority Muslim is North Korea).

EDIT: See ICE's website for an official source: http://www.ice.gov/pi/specialregistration/index.htm and http://www.ice.gov/pi/specialregistration/archive.htm. The domestic registration procedures are on an archived page because they applied to people in the US prior to the effective date of the port-of-entry procedures.
It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics.

You are all stardust.

You couldn't be here if stars hadn't exploded. Because the elements, the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution weren't created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars. And the only way they could get into your body is if the stars were kind enough to explode.

So forget Jesus. The stars died so you could be here today. </quote>
Such an interesting discussion for me. I'm Hany, an Egyptian American, currently living in the states and involved with technology.

The one thing that I absolutely will say is better in the United States than other places is funding. The idea of Venture Capital (and the sheer amount of investors) is found more here than anywhere else. A good network of capable engineers is nice but honestly you can find that in a lot of places.

To this day, the idea of starting a startup, getting funding, being an entrepreneur, and possibly failing is very American. To this day, the simple idea of "failing is okay" is more concentrated here. But other than that, you can be successful anywhere, really. The odds might be harder but not necessarily so much harder that it would be deemed impossible. Just my two cents.

Feel free to contact me, btw. I'd love to help any way I can. Email's in profile.
You don't need to be in America to 'make success'. There are many non US startups that did very well. Also, getting into the US to startup is nearly impossible, so you'll have to look for other options anyway.

1) You don't need an 'American friend' to pay for hosting, all you need is a creditcard.

2) You'll need to properly setup a company. Given your circumstances, I would look at the free zones in the UAE. There you'll find the most business friendly places of the whole (Arab) Middle East. No corruption and bureaucracy there. Second, given the focus you put on being a young Muslim Arab, I'm sure you'll find your way in the UAE, just a short flight from Egypt.

You can find more info on UAE free zones at

http://www.dubaiinternetcity.com/ (the Dubai Free Zone for IT companies)

http://www.rakftz.com/ (the (cheaper) Free Zone of Ras al Khaimah (another emirate of the UAE).
That's what I asked previously here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1514218

Anyway, my input is, based on what you know best and your experiences, come up with something that makes sense. Keep developing the hypotheses until you cannot poke holes in them or have honest doubts about them, then go test your hypotheses against anyone who knows what they're talking about other than yourself. If your hypotheses are still intact, then expend the cost to reach out to a potential customer. Saves you a lot of hard work.
"It was my first job as a developer, and when my boss left I got promoted to "CTO" and got to hire my own small team. This is one of the main reasons I haven't really "gone after them". I don't really want to screw them over, I just want my money."

Did you deserve the job of CTO? If so, then you also deserved the paycheck. If not, then be happy with the fact that you got a cushy job that will look good on your resume and leave it at that.

Seriously, this is business. It's good to be happy about the time you worked there, but don't let it cloud your judgement. I'm not saying you should go after them. I'm just saying not to hold back because you feel you owe them something that you don't.
Zed cites the rationale for web scale /dev/null (http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/6995033/).

To thoroughly kill the joke, the idea is that you can write really fast software by writing your output to /dev/null (vs. disk) which basically makes write a NOP. Of course, it's completely useless in practice :)

web scale and sharding are just two other overused terms from the cited video (making fun of NoSQL fanboys).
Thanks alot, I like the idea about work flows. I'll see what we can do to try an incorporate those in
How about a dead simple document sharing website that lets people read the same doc, on multiple computers, at the same time? (i.e. if you have a bunch of people on a call with computers up, the speaker can send around a reading link that lets him or her flip pages for everyone viewing.) I find myself wishing for this functionality pretty regularly lately. Broadcasting the pointer, real time comments & annotations seem cool too.
Thank you for your interesting comment and the links.

I still wonder if you could elaborate a little bit more. It seems to me that we speak about different things.

I am glad you brought up the Bob Dylan's music as an example. I agree that for him the music was an effective tool to pass his emotions and experiences to a listener. However his main tool is his lyrics and we cannot separate it from his music.

A good argument for that is that Bob Dylan isn't popular or well-known in the non-english speaking countries. I would say it is because his music isn't expressive without the lyrics. He wasn't a musician in the sense Beethoven was, he was rather a modernized poet.

This is the difference between Bob Dylan and "classical music" we discuss in this thread. My point is about where we need to place Beethoven music as an intellectual activity. I say it is different from written art, science or discussion. These are methods for creative people to transfer their experience and understanding to other people.

Music (pure music) doesn't involve it literary, only indirectly. It involves finding sound patterns that are known to bring pleasure to a listener. Nobel but different.

There is no question that music brings pleasure to people's and specifically yours and mine life and it is an important part of the culture and I am certainly not arguing that people should stop listening to music.

Music definitely tells us a lot about the cultural evolution with time just as you argue. But cuisine and drugs consumption habits of the epoch (alcohol, cigarrette, opium) tells us a lot too.

I say classical music has more to do with wines culture than with, say, literature. It's chemistry in one case and the humans sharing ideas in the other.

Wines are fine but I think conscious decision to spend time to learn the good wines and then spend time indulging elaborately fine tastes is a little bit twisted one. Maybe just a personal attitude.

Feynman might illustrate my point more succintly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKTSaezB4p8&feature=playe...
Does anyone know how much Cheezburger/Pet Holdings is worth? Can they afford to buy Reddit? I'm not sure how much Reddit is worth (I heard $12 million to $65 million back when it sold, presumably more now). Pet Holdings didn't seem to be a moneybags kind of company (http://www.crunchbase.com/company/pet-holdings-inc).
> Most of the examples you gave are applications. They require considering things external to the a core problem, such as user interaction and network communication.

"Core problem" to me means solving a problem a user has. Things like user interaction are indeed part of the core problem.

Unless there's another sense of the term I'm missing?
I used to be under the impression that one was obliged to take a low salary while employed by or founding an early-stage startup. Your seemingly sincere comment and an anecdote from a friend who was offered a quite competitive salary are starting to change my mind.
Awesome instant interaction - though for me to switch, I'd still want an account so I needn't fill out the generic info each time.
"Well, they owe you SOMETHING, either cash or if they don't have it, equity."

Who would want equity in a failing company? If I were the OP and they offered me equity, I'd be insulted.
You might be thinking about the Porsche short squeeze on VW stock back in October 2008.
Ah, yes, “Potemkin Consulting”.
It's likely the founder is a visionary without a pragmatic streak. Conferences and iPhones is what you give your developers when you're too optimistic about future business.

The founder is unlikely to be aware of his poor judgement. I know this, because I've made the same mistake. Tempering vision wih pragmatism is hard, especially if you achieve early success.

If your founder doesn't admit fault and put in a solid plan to turn the business around, leave.
I spent two summers working in the international services department of a major American medical school, helping with visa applications for foreign medical students and doctors.

I can tell you that we had Iranian nationals studying there. (Yes, I know, not Arab). It's certainly not impossible; other posters are right that the biggest barriers are cost, US immigration services' incompetence, and slow response time to applications.
Just remember that 100K/yr is "low" to the guys giving you your $10M series A.
It seems to me that you can't be sure unless someone is auditing the weights or measures actually in use. Consumers can do a rough audit using their gas gauges, but it's not particularly precise.
I'm currently making a multiplayer shooter game for node knockout!

It's not currently very impressive, but I hope it will be in about 21 hours :) I might submit to HN depending on how well it turns out.
Why Do We Detail the Minutia of Our Lives Online?
Any way you can deduct the loss against taxes?
Okay, here's an interesting idea. First of all, make sure both of you agree that they owe you money and you agree on the amount. Get it in writing.

Then ask them to pay you a set amount every week to pay down the amount. No matter what their financial situation is, they certainly can pay you something every week. Insist on getting paid something, even if it's just $1! Collect the check in person every week. Email them a receipt with an updated balance due. It's a very visible reminder to them that they owe you money and it's a way that you will at least get some money back!
Sorry for the down vote, small buttons on phone. I agree strongly with your comment. These guys push off votes over and over to a point they don't get anything done. The biggest bunch of procrastinators ever.
I can second this as a good way of learning. The Node.js site links to a very readable long polling chat app here: http://github.com/ry/node_chat. I learned the framework by modifying this into an IRC-style party game am now working on mobile clients for it.
In my experience every programmer I know who is around age 35 has already worked at at least one startup and would prefer to avoid doing it again...
Using Google Analytics is probably a reasonable method, as it's a third-party and not open to direct manipulation.

It's easy to manipulate Google Analytics numbers downwards (as the company would want to do): Remove or break the javascript.
You need to turn it around and make what you are thinking of as a disadvantage an advantage for you.

There are plenty of rich Arab Muslims around. Chase them for investment - ask them why they aren't funding Arab Muslim companies and are instead investing in News Corporation (eg http://www.kingdom.com.sa/en/MC_PR_NewsDetails.asp?p=3&I...).

Not only are they rich, but many of them are well connected, too.
socat is a little closer to what you really want than netcat: http://www.dest-unreach.org/socat/
"In 1994, Steele joined Sun Microsystems and was invited by Bill Joy to become a member of the Java team after the language had been designed, since he had a track record of writing good specifications for existing languages." --Wikipedia
Legacy applications and Age of Empires
First find an open source project that you want to contribute to. Next find it's issue/bug tracker. Find an issue that you can reproduce relatively easily. Next get the source code and start tinkering around till you try and figure out why the issue happens. Next try and fix the issue and if necessary add tests. Create a patch and submit!

Even if you can't solve the issue, just reproducing it and reporting your findings can be very helpful! Also make sure you read any contribution guidelines for the project if available.

You will also need version control-fu, whether it's Git, Mercurial or SVN or whatever the project is using. You need to be able to use it, at least the basics to make a patch.

Most importantly have fun and be nice! :)
Looks like a really cool app. I guess open sourcing it will allow iPhone developers to run it?

I guess Apple really wanted to reject the App, but didn't want the backlash so is just letting it rot. Sorta like those companies that you interview with that never send a 'no' back and make you go mad with being in limbo. There are reports about some apps being pending review for 200 days.

I guess he's hoping for approval or he might have released it on Cydia.
Well said. I discovered Guy's work early in my programming career, and am very glad I did.
I only know the basics of these (SQL injection and integer overflow for kicks in high school, dumb context-aware codec fuzzer for a memory allocation bug in FFmpeg), but I'd like to take your quiz to see what I'm missing. I'm co-teaching NetPen at Northwestern this fall and want to know what I can focus on.

I'm turning 21 in a couple months, for whatever it's worth.
Years Later, No Magic Bullet Against Alzheimer’s Disease
I wonder how many indie developers make a choice to not develop significant iOS-based products (such as this one) and instead build "unit converters" and "fart apps" since those make it into the store with no problem.
For a website, I offered login with Twitter, Facebook or custom username/password. I thought people would take the easy way, and use their FB login. Wrong! 90% of them chose the custom login + password.
tmux is a great BSD-licensed alternative:

http://tmux.sourceforge.net/

I've tried both, and the licensing issue aside, I've found I prefer tmux.

Anyway, not wanting to turn this into a gnu vs. bsd, tmux vs. screen argument, but I didn't eve know tmux existed until someone pointed me to it, so I'm just passing on the knowledge.
Sounds fun. Super lightweight Skype screensharing.