skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I saw Mark Cuban speak last week, and he talked about driving to Austin to meet Michael Dell to buy computers out of his dorm (Cuban was then running a systems integration business). He leveraged some family cash, but the guy is scrappy.

Interestingly, Cuban's entire keynote was on why you shouldn't take VC money (at an event sponsored by VCs). Nothing that hasn't been said here before, but still quite good.
> I'd be interested to hear how the road construction budget compares to the amount of money brought in by these.

The best I can do to answer that is to point you to a study by the Texas DOT (the original page is down, but it's cited widely, e.g.: http://sustainablecitiescollective.com/Home/17093):

> Applying this methodology, revealed that no road pays for itself in gas taxes and fees. For example, in Houston, the 15 miles of SH 99 from I-10 to US 290 will cost $1 billion to build and maintain over its lifetime, while only generating $162 million in gas taxes. That gives a tax gap ratio of .16, which means that the real gas tax rate people would need to pay on this segment of road to completely pay for it would be $2.22 per gallon.

> This is just one example, but there is not one road in Texas that pays for itself based on the tax system of today. Some roads pay for about half their true cost, but most roads we have analyzed pay for considerably less.

---

> I'm okay with that, as long as we also support the idea that the cost of public schools should be supported entirely by those who send their children to public schools, and the cost of Medicaid is supported entirely by those who benefit from Medicaid.

Is the dividing line between drivers and non-drivers really the rich vs. the poor? I bought my first car at 17 for $4k. Plenty of folks of all income levels drive.

The problem doesn't have to do with who uses the roads but the fact that the subsidies distort their decision-making such that they use the roads even which it doesn't make economic sense to use them.

In a regular, market-based transportation system, you'd use whichever mode fit the circumstances. For example, rather than driving your single-occupant vehicle 3 hours down a crowded (but free!) highway to a neighboring city, you might instead take an inter-city bus or train and then rent a car or use transit at your destination. But only if the actual cost of your share of the roads' cost (collected via electronic tolls and gas taxes) led you to do so.

By using markets to inform decisions, like in the case above, we can make more efficient use of our available space & infrastructure and reduce time and fuel wasted in traffic, for example.

I want drivers to bear the cost of their infrastructure, just as I want riders of buses, trains and airplanes to do the same. Because when we subsidize any of these, we distort decisions and lead people to over-invest, over-allocate in that direction.
Some software to help trucks travel always full
I guess that'd depend on the situation and I certainly understand that feeling - I've been there before!

I presently work for http://iconfactory.com, and we try to keep meetings to a minimum as a matter of principal. Artists need flow to do their thing just as us programmers do, and the company is run by artists. I'm also remote so the only random co-worker interruptions I have are via iChat.
I don't know if I hope so. There are certain behaviors for which one ought to be embarrassed and that we don't want to encourage. Shame on you for groping the girl at the bar; for that you got punched in the eye and consider it a lesson learned. But if we come to realize that this type of thing happens frequently because it's all over youtube, and it's all real, I'm not sure it's a good idea to accept it.

On the other hand, you're probably right that there are some benefits in accelerating the acceptance of oddly taboo things. I'll take my privacy, though.
Ask HN: skills to look for in young iphone/ipad programmer?
I'm looking to hire an iphone/ipad developer here in Colombia. I want someone young in university, not a full timer. I'll pay them a decent wage, lend them ipad/iphones, pay for their developer status etc.

I don't think it'll be easy to find someone with actual iphone/ipad experience, so my question is, what kind of development experience should I look for that means that this person can fairly easily learn/pick up ipad development? I can evaluate some level of technicality/programmerness, but not C++, for example.
I like to imagine a culture where your real name is a secrete known only to you and your immediate family, and the name everybody else knows you by is an alias that changes from year to year. It's very science fiction.
Differences between Emacs and Vim
I worry less about the tagging aspect. The real problem is having those pictures on the net in the first place.
I see what you mean. The vocabulary has been tricky for us so far. We'll keep working on it. Thanks!
What NASA’s CIO Has Learned About Managing Change
1) The overheard issue is something they can fix, they simply don't have any incentives to. Limited partners will have to crack down before we see any change.

2) Are there really many banks ready to fund a technology startup's series A? Even if its a business model with a high chance of a 5x return?
I have a better one for you Schmitt:

Google my name. (Check my profile)

Now as embarrassing as the things I say on my website are in and of themselves, check out the entries on that first google result page and you find this wonderful character:

The Baltimore City Grand Jury indicted David Piccione, 28, on charges of kidnapping, false imprisonment, second-degree assault and reckless endangerment. Court documents allege on July 11 while at a gas station David Piccione and his ex-girlfriend got into an argument. Piccione assaulted the woman, dragged her into his car against her will and drove away.

Figure out how to remove my not too common name from sharing a front page with that genius!
A list of them.

Classic:

App:

bing, box.net, dimdim, drop.io, flickr, Google Docs and Spreadsheet, meebo, mint.com, picnik, tinychat, Yahoo! Mail,

Fun:

Allrecipes.com, Boing Boing, CocktailDB, epicurious, Funny or Die, Hulu, Instructables, The Onion, Pandora, UStream, YouTube,

Info:

Craigslist, Howcast, iFixit, IMDB, indeed, Kayak, metacritic, Snopes, TED.com, Wikipedia

News:

BBC, Legitstalker, The New York Times, SI.com

Shopping:

Amazon, The Consumerist, Etsy, Restaurant.com

Social:

Facebook, Kiva, Tumblr, Twitter,

Tech:

Ars Technica, Filehippo.com, gdgt, Lifehacker, Makeuseof.com, techmeme

Undiscovered:

App:

CeeVee, Flockdraw, fur.ly, Roc,

Fun:

Band Camp, Clicker, Critical Past, Fiverr.com, "TheHotlist.com", Kideos, Locate TV, Pixton, RadioTuna, Roadside America, ShortFormTV, Shovio, WhoSampled,

Info:

Atlas Obscura, Calcmoolator, Everyscape, LyricRat, Quora, RiskyRoads.org, SeeClickFix, SepiaTown, SiteJabber, StarFall.com, This we know, Waterlife, We choose the moon, "We are no so smart"

News:

How is life today,

Shopping:

The DealMap, FoodPair, GigPark, Listia, LocalDirt, Milo, NeighborGoods, OoKong, Price Cheater, Seat Geek, SquareTrade, TinyPay.me, Zeer,

Tech:

Gizmo's Freeware, Lucy, Quirky

Edit:

I found my company, thehotlist.com is listed in undiscovered fun category when I typed the list. This made my day.
Man is he a shark. Seriously, between him, Steve Jobs, and Eric Schmidt it's no wonder a glorified sales guy like Ballmer is lost in the wilderness.
I don't know Prolog very well, and I don't know what this pseudo language structure is like. But one place where you will often see stacks even when compiling down to languages where you think you needn't use it is for handling exceptional and failures, e.g., OOM.

At a lower-level, function composition is a form of stack discipline, where ordering is important, but placement less so.

In any case, I'm sure you can write a compiler that translates from X to Y, for some X and for some Y, using only Tic-Tac-Toe as your language, with readings from the back of Lucky Charms as the totality of your knowledge base. My point was that to really know compilers, you need to know a bit more than that.
I find that these really strong "screw employment!" kind of opinions like this tend to come from people who haven't really been successful following the path they espouse — it's always "aspiring" entrepreneurs, as this writer puts it. Either this kind of attitude is unhelpful or reality tends to temper it.
Correction: the stuff that really matters (like banks) has already been secured.

The other stuff still matters a lot, especially when users often share passwords between secure and non-secure websites. Or when companies offer a single sign-on service without mandatory encryption (I'm looking at you Facebook and Twitter)

This would be better than nothing (if it were ubiquitous), but I'd rather everything use SSL.
This is the most important reason why: http://danamccaffery.com/

This is a pretty famous case in Australia, their baby died of whooping cough which she was too young to be vaccinated against which she caught due to poor vaccination rates in their area. They went public with what happened on national TV which drew the ire of a anti vaccination lobby group called AVN (i refuse to link them) which then pursued them publicly and privately to disprove or retract their statements.

The Health Care Complaints Commission is now investigating the AVN for breaches of the health care provider code but as with most government organisations it takes time.
Sounds like a documentary I'd watch. Filmmakers?
Using aircraft carriers to win naval battles wasn't a conscious decision either (the US was just completely out of battleships), but it sure worked out nicely.

Still, the press in WWII was not interested in making the government look bad. They were active participants in keeping many secrets throughout the war, including the fact that FDR was crippled from polio. "Total war", which is unknown to this country since WWII, means the entire civilization participates in the war effort, and while the press had the legal freedom to criticize the government and reveal their secrets, it would have been unconscionable at the time for them to do anything that could impede the war effort.

Even more importantly, it's hard to imagine the US matching the degree of Japanese, German and Soviet atrocities against POW's and occupied territories during the war. Souvenir taking against policy is one thing--deliberate plundering, torture, murder, and rape as policy is quite another.
I'm not so sure. My own terms are pretty hardcore... :)
Pretty sure he said it's 5x harder for single founders who are accepted.
Why can't it be from someone who genuinely wants to encourage others like him?

If you read it again, it isn't necessarily all about "screw employment". It deals with the reality of trying to build something while necessarily employed in several places.
The Great Benefit of Test Driven Development Nobody Talks About
Then we don't have anything to argue about. I agree that modern Perl is a lot better than older perl, and that modules that fix perl, like perl5i, Coro, and Moose, enable you to write decent code using the language. I never tried to say otherwise. My point was, why bother, when you can use a language that doesn't need to be fixed in the first place? Life is so much simpler without all the extra accidental complexity.
But that's _everything_ worth doing, and isn't that how it's always been? For every Jimi Hendrix there were a zillion teenagers sitting in their poster-filled room with desires to melt faces and change the world with the power of Rock. Or for every Steel Magnate, there were guys running a 10-man shops hoping to roll enough steel this quarter to buy the coke smelter down the road a ways.

It all starts somewhere, and almost everything with any market visibility has hundreds if not thousands of everyone from Mom and Pops to multinationals gunning for the big ring.

This is why the corporations dominate: They know the "little guys" like us don't think it's worth it to disrupt their industries.

I'd say the only technology company that really takes alot of capital to start is product manufacturing business, and even then, aren't there whole industries catering to garage businesses like thomasnet or rapid prototyping firms? Or just bootstrap it like DODOCase.
For the last few years, I've provided free tech support for the Saskatoon Sexual Health Centre (http://www.sexualhealthcentresaskatoon.ca/index2.htm). It started out with them having some PC problems, but ended up turning into writing some custom statistic-tracking and client-management tools that have significantly reduced their paper burden around the office. We're just getting started on putting together appointment-management software, so that they can finally move away from their last big paper-based system.

I'm currently a M.Sc. student in Computer Science, with a huge backlog of startup/project ideas that I've been keeping on the back burner while I work on my thesis. I've got good technical skills, but would love to learn more about the business side.
Profitable but poor, am I doing it right?
I have recently released an iPhone app product that I am really proud of. So far it's been out for about 5 weeks and has consistently sold 5-10 units per day with no marketing behind it. I was wondering if this is a normal start or subpar for other iPhone app developers? It's generating income, although $15 a day obviously isn't going to retire me anytime soon. I plan on releasing some additional products soon but I wanted to ask some other developers their opinion.

Does advertising your iPhone app work on mass-market websites or is it better to advertise on other iPhone apps? Any additional marketing methods that you would recommend?

Did you find your app orders increased naturally over time as word-of-mouth spread or did it plateau and require marketing efforts on your part to increase order volume?
Not all handicapped have wheelchairs. I have a friend who has to drive for long distances, but they use a cane for short distances.
Obviously the goal is to be built in to the OS. Flipping your objection around, you could say that with tcpcrypt more of your traffic will be encrypted than is now; it's no worse than the status quo.
I forgot to mention: the book has a web-site at http://www1.idc.ac.il/tecs/ where you can download all the projects and software and some of the chapters of the book in .pdf form.
There's a short-term solution that requires no changes to userspace.
Be sure to choose a name that nobody would choose for themselves. You know, for authenticity.
In a live demo of the buttons in Chrome those irregularities are not present. I think it might be a Safari thing? Either that or JPEG compression artifacts.
Whoa, whoa, whoa! Slow down there, cowboy. Just because my education was deficient in one way doesn't mean it didn't make up for it in others. I'm incredibly thankful for my liberal arts education; it turned me into the happy hippy I am today. Do I have some frustrations and regrets in terms of the things I missed? Absolutely. But that in no way prevents me from appreciating the things I did learn, which were numerous and profound.
Well, sure, but I just don't feel all that encouraged by somebody making grandiose claims that are based on neither experience nor hard data. I don't mean to imply that anyone's heart is in a bad place, but it just reads to me like somebody selling himself on a get rich quick scheme. I know people who have bankrupted themselves on that sort of thing, so this kind of baseless exuberance makes me feel concerned.
Don't know why people are downvoting you, what you say is very sensible and financially completely right - if the interest rate of the loan is below what you can get in interest on a nearly risk-free investment, then it is cheaper to pay the loan as slowly as possible. Having said that, I disagree with you that it is foolish to pay back loans as quickly as possible. Having no debt makes it much easier to live with no income (without having to declare bankruptcy). If that isn't something you aspire to then it doesn't matter, but I would personally enjoy that very much and will continue paying very close to the absolute maximum I can afford each month on my admittedly cheap loans.
Make a yahoo tv widget thing with this. http://connectedtv.yahoo.com/developer/
If you want to code, you can get away with ad-hoc learning.

I think most things I learnt in undergrad were just plain fun! pure, unadulterated stream of "Good Ideas!"
I drew a beta using the mouse with my wrong hand, and it worked ok.
For those SaSS fans out there checkout compass's CSS3 gradient helpers (http://compass-style.org/docs/reference/compass/css3/gradien...). Compass does not include the dx filters, but that would be an excellent thing for that lib to support.

Also, the markup Posterous uses is more verbose than it needs to be. We figured out a way use plain 'ol <button/> or <a/> tags and style them as buttons. Maybe I'll blog about that when we roll this stuff out.

Visually, those buttons look good.
As a fellow molecular bio guy, I agree with you. I like a healthy degree of skepticism, and I think cholesterol is altogether too taboo in the US (to the point where people won't eat eggs, even though it's been shown that people do not absorb almost any cholesterol from eggs) BUT this guy uses a lot of misdirection in his post and I'm left with a bad taste in my mouth.

This article amounts to saying "cholesterol is not always bad" (true) and "all of your cells need cholesterol" (true), therefore "most cholesterol is good for you" (probably false), and "don't try to lower your cholesterol using modern medicine" (too absolute a statement for me to buy).

My take?

1. Physicians do need to question what they learn about medicines and their actual uses/usefulness. They need to avoid the temptation to latch onto medical zeitgeists and bandwagons, instead thinking through what they know and don't know about drugs they prescribe.

2. Skepticism is good, but it needs to be responsible skepticism. Especially with regards to complex medical issues, honesty and humility (not pre-conceived notions) are most important.
Yeah, optimism is for babies, right? :)
Flagged for editorializing and unjustified hype in the headline. This has been tried N times before and failed every time; I don't see anything new that SiteFog is bringing to bear (other than using a slower programming language).
I'm unbelievably biased working for GitHub, but the layout of Launchpad is abhorrent. It took me almost 10 minutes to even figure out how to view any of the OpenStack code.

I hope Canonical hires someone with some semblance of design and user interaction if they're going to continue running that site.
http://jjcm.org/css3-buttons/
Here's a demo page. I agree though, ridiculous that it didn't include one.

edit - tried them in IE6/7, they don't degrade that gracefully. They exist and work fine as buttons, but visually it's hard to tell that they are. If you use this I'd recommend adding a :hover on the span's background color as well just so a user knows to click the thing.
Thanks a bunch, Jesse -- I really appreciate you taking the time to answer in such detail!

Like I said, it's slick app and I totally see myself using it, so this is just icing on the cake.
If I really wanted to, sure I could scrounge up the extra free time to pursue my ideas. But then my entire life would be my day job and my side project, at the expense of absolutely everything else.

There is nothing wrong with that if that is what is important to you. But I also value friendships, exercise, reading, relaxing, cooking, etc. A nice balanced life is crucial for good health and well being. I would argue for most people, the cost of completely throwing away all balance in your life would not match the reward that your product would bring once launched.
The solution is obviously to put every kid in a giant faraday cage
Tim O'Reilly, Oracle of Silicon Valley
Please be aware of this dubious source. Not only is HuffPo basically a bastion for crackpots with outrageous anti-establishment medical claims, but Dr. Mercola is on a sort-of one man war for crazy.

For example, he believes that Aspartame is surely a deadly neurotoxin that EVERYONE uses daily: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mercola/aspartame-health-ri... And also, pasteurized milk is surely bad, right? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mercola/dairy-free-avoid-th... (nevermind the other issues at play!) (and milk in general is a deadly cancer-causing toxin! http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2000/07/3...)

This guy has some extremely fringe and poorly supported claims, has a vanity domain name offering health advice, and sells health products direct over the internet (including known scams like Acai berry extract, "bioTHIN", and even a line of "healthy cookware!").

In other words, he has all the red flags of a Kevin Trudeau that hasn't been caught yet. He's selling magic light lamps (http://products.mercola.com/himalayan-salt/himalayan-salt-la... ) for pete's sake!
Which is not to say you necessarily want to skip parsing forever, but you probably don't want to go through several chapters about it upfront.
I managed to draw my 'alpha' backwards (whups) and it still worked OK for me. Maybe it's just a penmanship-related quirk?
I contracted whooping cough about 5 years ago at the age of 29. I had no idea what was wrong with me and it took 3 doctors to diagnose it correctly. I can't totally fault the doctor's diagnosis on the initial visit. When you have someone come into your office in late October in Minnesota complaining of coughing and respirator pain, it's probably something pretty common. I was on several different medications for 5 weeks. I would start to feel better while on the medication and then get worse when I finished the medication. At no time did the medication help completely, and my condition worsened at time went by. I had several chest x-rays and they all came back clean. The third doctor I visited finally took interest in my case and expanded the tests and came back with a diagnosis of whooping cough. After I found that out and did my own research (which include listening to sound clips), I knew it was the correct diagnosis. I had a 11-month old son at the time and my main concern was that he would contract it also. Thankfully, that never happened. It took me about 5 months before I was completely healed. I wouldn't wish that disease on my worst enemy. Every time you go into a coughing fit, you feel like you are going to die. I blacked out 3 times from coughing fits. They come up on you very fast and are very intense and uncontrollable. I also lost my voice for about 4 weeks. My advice is to get yourself (and your children if you have any) vaccinated...yesterday!
Because I don't have to work very hard and they pay well.
"Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four. This pays especially well in technology, where you earn a premium for working fast." - Paul Graham

http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html
>That seems... crazy. Maybe he was simply observing that such policies were likely to take shape in the future. But if they do, the company he runs will be the primary cause of it.

I believe you're looking for Mark Zuckerberg, not Eric Schmidt. Google doesn't force you to sprawl your name all over the web, they just make it a little easier to see where it's happened.
It's not just you, I promise. I find Launchpad's UI barely comprehensible at best, and every time I have to use it I die a little inside. I haven't heard a single good word about Launchpad from anyone outside of Canonical...
Safe now, but for how long? What about upcoming versions? What about relicensing? What if they are breaking some fine print? It's not that easy.
Why innovation thrives at the Mayo Clinic
Optimism is fine. The phrase "a @#$% goldmine!" is a flashing red warning sign.
The Yogurt Chronicles
From the article - Eric Schmidt: "They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."