skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The pension problem is scarier than he says. I wish that they merely projected rosy numbers. However they have also been accepting risk to try to make those numbers. When those risky investments fail, we'll suddenly have an even worse hole.

Note that I say "when", not "if". I say that because significant investments were made in private equity funds during their spending spree a few years back. There is every reason to believe that those investments are going to blow up.

It is worth noting that this is the second time that private equity went on a big spending spree. The previous time was in the late 80s, and the big investors were the savings & loans institutions. Google S&L crisis for more on how poorly that turned out. Then note that the recent spending spree was over an order of magnitude bigger.
I think then maybe I did follow the basic model you suggest. I don't think at the first "launch" my product was completely viable. It had a lot of bugs and was pretty ugly. However getting people I didn't know to look at it really drove me through the first point you made. The product and idea changed dramatically through a very organic process driven by feedback.

I am seeing the point you and the other commenter are making about product and market fit though. The other ideas I have are similar scenarios to the one I'm working on now, where the same approach basically fits. So really I may be just be over generalizing.
+1 for Launchbar.

After going back and forth between Quicksilver and Launchbar for a while, I eventually settled on Launchbar because I found it to be a bit faster. I think Quicksilver is more powerful, but I never really used the additional capabilities so it ended up being a pretty easy choice for me.

Even after Spotlight was added to OS X, I stuck with Launchbar because it takes a few less keystrokes for many tasks and it has search templates (so searching Google, a dictionary, or a thesaurus requires only a few keystrokes). Quicksilver can also do something similar, I'm not sure about the other options.
Nice try. If tarsnap does anything that duplicity or s3napback doesn't do, I wouldn't know it from the tarsnap website.
The Hacker Mindset
I too know a ton of friends who are doing it with zero probs.

I also know for a fact they are working illegally.
Promovare firme si evenimente
Promovare firme si evenimente, promovare afaceri din Romania.
Odd as this will sound to the inexperienced, this story is not an outlier. This is what happens in the median acquisition. Investors now treat startups much better than they used to, but acquirers are the final frontier of assholedom. When you get interest from an acquirer, assume by default that it will play out exactly as described in this post: initial eagerness, followed by long and distracting delays, followed by an attempt to renegotiate the terms at the last moment. Then you can be pleasantly surprised if things turn out otherwise.
Stuart Halloway has a great explanation of anonymous functions in "Programming Clojure." He identifies the specific conditions where you might choose to use an anonymous function given that, for readability reasons, naming functions is usually a good idea.
All I can tell you is:

* you have to find out what the value your service generates is to different groups of customers (an MBA would call them "segments").

* you have to figure out the cost of acquiring and maintaining customers in each segment.

* you price based on the value (if it creates $10/mo apparent value, that's the number with a gravitational pull).

* bust out cleverness to figure out ways to capture money from high-value low-volume segments without scaring away low-value high-volume segments.

I'm close enough to Colin's target market to know that "just stick the server's filesystem in tarsnap and don't even bother taking an inventory of what's on the machine" is worth multiples of S3+80% just in recovered admin productivity.
Duplicity GPG-encrypts all data too, though.
This is almost 'trollworthy'. Hey we 'almost' got bought out, so hey try our service (Profit)
There's also a mental barrier that comes up when you see something unusual. I don't think about my expenses in pico dollars and I don't think about my important data in bytes. The worst part for me is that at $0.30/GB for storage and bandwidth the cost seems so low that I really don't even care if I'm using a full GB or just 12 bytes. Charge me the $0.30 and be done with it. If I can't glance at the service and guestimate how much it would cost me I'm not going to stick around long enough to find out.
Ok. First I think the jury is still out if it will be a major selling point or not. Maybe you are right, maybe you are not. It seems a bit premature to use such adjectives.

Second that is true about Apple. But that's their philosophy: I am sure if Firefox can have their own philosophy so can Apple. They like things that work, and work well (though sometimes they fail, as shown by the antenna problem). I don't see any reason why Apple wouldn't include WebM support once its hardware is capable of decoding it in hardware.

But if your argument is that Apple should implement WebM despite it being much worse for mobile simply because otherwise Firefox can't join in, then I think you are asking a bit much.

If it hardware acceleration weren't important for the battery then I would agree with you that Apple should implement WebM pronto (while still keeping AVC). As it is, I think there are not clear rights or wrongs, and it's up to each company to decide what they think we'll be best.
Groove Press New to Y Hacker
I am new to Y-Hacker News and the art of hacking in general. Hope to learn more here...

PS: Groove Press, Coming 2010 / Q4 to the world wide web ...
I would pay $2.99 for the iPhone reader and $0 for the website because that's what Instapaper charges and this seems about the same.
While it didn't bankrupt California the economic impact is very relevant with regards of the sums required to pay state pensions.

Also I assumed everybody knows it was Davis who allowed that to happen, well before Schwarzenegger was elected.
MongoDB Is Web Scale NSFW
Without technical details on how they actually manage this (Anyone can figure out that storage is an accumulative cost) I am pretty skeptic.

At $5/month the break-even on even a VERY cheap solution is around $40GB/person.
I just want to second what alain is saying here. I'm a foreign national working in US on a visa and I've spent a ton of time and money on immigration law.

There is some outright CRAP advice in this thread that I know for a fact is BS. Even if you are doing something that is unlikely to get caught at the time, if you ever apply for a green card they will investigate the entire history of your activity in the US and this is when problems can occur. (problems will result in almost certain deportation and being barred from entering US again)

I have also heard of a VC/investor passing information to the DHS about a startup founder who pitched him who was working illegally - think about that for a moment. (I've got nothing against him, the investor was totally in his right to do so - plus no one is going to fund a company that has founders working outside the law anyway).

PLEASE get legal advice, and from someone who you know has already helped startup founders. Many lawyers don't understand the landscape we are in.
For the sake of argument (or, because you trust me on this), let's stipulate that Tarsnap is significantly more secure than duplicity; things can go wrong with duplicity (or create untenable administrative headaches) that don't with Tarsnap.
I agree with the author. Stealth mode assumes you will deliver a competitive and popular product in your first try. This rarely happens.
So apparently the Guugu Yimithirr have a pitch-pefect conception of cardinality at all times, because they describe space in north-south-east-west, which probably depends somehow on a periodic synchronization with the position of the sun.

Would be curious to see how they'd thrive in Alaska.
It's not all psychological, the problem is that massive amounts of capital have allocated to the wrong uses - building 100 homes, when only 50 were needed or building a factory that produces 10,000 items when only 5,000 are needed. Unfortunately do to all the interference in the market no one is sure what the correct prices are and hence what the actual demand is and what is and isn't profitable. Adding to this all the messiness of new insurance laws, etc it becomes very hard to predict what the next correct move will be so instead people save their cash until they know what to do.

The way we find out what is real is by seeing what people will buy at what price and letting everyone go bankrupt who can't pay their bills. This will depress the costs of goods until demand picks up. For instance, everyone thinks their house is worth probably 30 - 40% than it is. So they refuse to sell at lower prices, keeping inventory off the market. Thus no one is buying houses since the asking price is too high. Housing is tough one because it takes forever for the prices to adjust back to normal, but everywhere this type of effect can be seen.
Tweet Code – A "shortest code solution" Twitter contest
One of my favorite shortcuts is the Command-? (Command-Shift-/) which will let you search the application menu in any app.
Also, Cmd-Shift-Tab and Cmd-Shift-` will walk you through Apps and Windows (respectively) in the opposite direction.
> You cannot apply for a green card on TN visa

Actually, you can:

http://www.naftatnlawyer.com/applying-for-green-card-tn-st/

> It has to be renewed annually

There's a 3 year TN now:

http://www.naftatnlawyer.com/nafta-tn-blog/2008/10/16/three-...

If you're Canadian, I suggest subscribing to the Grasmick.com newsletter and poking around the site. Lots of good info there.
I would have said. "Ok, 30% of the product relies on insider knowledge. You can have that for free. How much is the remaining 70% worth to you?"

Apple wasn't paying for the same insider knowledge of their platform's functionality that they already had; they were paying for the additional work that created new functionality.

I don't see any reason why he shouldn't have asked for as much as he thought the product was worth.
Also; Backblaze backs up everything on your computer except your operating system, applications, temporary files, or those over 9GB.
Depends, Enlive is seeing at least some use as well (the web app I built for personal use has enlive handling the HTML as well).
It's great that more people are exposed to the functional programming style. Kudos to OP for trying something new.

It bugs me whenever FP people talk about state being bad as if it should be avoided at all cost. State is bad if its scope is not carefully managed. Global state is generally bad because its scope allows the whole program to modify it, making it difficult to follow its validity. Local state maintained as a local variable in a function is perfectly fine. Its scope is small and its changes can be tracked easily. Pure functional code actually also implicitly maintain state in their parameters and return values, and the passing of the return values as parameters to next function.
KeyRemap4Macbook

I’ve enabled “Simultaneous Key Presses” which allow me to use F+H/J/K/L instead of arrow keys. It takes a little getting used to, but I find myself hardly ever needing to leave the keyboard.
Of course, the other thing to note here is that restaurants don't put dollar signs next to prices because they don't want people sitting there thinking about how much it costs.

The word "picodollar" is basically a dollar sign with a <blink> tag around it.
Whereas "temporary" taxes are popular with non-wealthy people? Nice try w/ the class warfare.

FWIW I live in Orange County but what really matters is what city you live in within OC.
Or we all push for marriage equality so that LGBT folks can marry too, with full federal recognition including immigration status for the other partner.
New to FP here as well (couple of years playing, more serious work in last few months)

It used to bug me too, but then I realized that common mathematical problems are the only "easy" way to explain how some things work.

Put another way, the problem domain in most applications is laid bare in FP. So your structures are intricately tied to whatever you're doing. You can either put up with a 30-minute "backstory" on why you're writing function foo, or we can just go with some kind of math deal. Usually authors pick the math option.

I found that once I could plow through writing short snippets, then I could start reading example code from the web. That helped a lot.
Yet none of those companies were founded even by poor white youths, much less black youths (even white females). Apple, founded by Jobs, who did an internship at HP as a high school student, and attended Reed. Google by Stanford grad students, Dell, son of a doctor and stockbroker, who went to UT Austin. Microsoft, two Harvard students.

The problem is that a young black kid raised where many are raised, SAT scores not withstanding, likely won't have the opportunities that those I listed had. Let me give a glimpse of Michael Dell's early life, from Wikipedia: "The son of an orthodontist and a stockbroker, Dell attended Herod Elementary School in Houston, Texas. In a bid to enter business early, he applied to take a high school equivalency exam at age eight. In his early teens, he invested his earnings from part-time jobs in stocks and precious metals.
Dell purchased his first calculator at age seven and encountered his first teletype machine in junior high, which he programmed after school."

If you go into the inner-cities, this type of early life, even from the bright and ambitious will likely look very different.

And lastly, Asians are disciminated against in a very different way than Blacks are. They are discriminated in the belief that they excel at math and engineering. I've seen first hand, in elementary school, how powerful expectations are (and there is good data around this too).
I think it really depends on what kind of startup you're running. Three people meeting in coffee shops is different from someone who got a lot of venture capital from the start and has the need for a pretty large infrastructure.

One mistake I often hear about in startups is that they avoid getting sysadmins for way too long. Yes, you're a bunch of programmers, you have the technical affinity/skills. Yes, your application is "in the cloud". It's still not a good idea to waste time with OS issues of your servers, proper firewalls, your LAN's Cisco router/firewall etc.

And rather than trying to coax the most amount of hours out of your people, try to get the maximum creativity out of them. Cheap desks are ok. A gray office isn't. And if the word "them" is ever used for a department or team within your company, it's bad – unless we're talking about a foosball league. You don't need corporate retreats to get the team spirit flowing. Transparent management, company activities, going out for a drink together, an internal blog…

Be open to hire people from different backgrounds. A room full of 20-somethings might appear to be pretty harmonious, as they often have similar interests and can argue about the same TV shows, but you might get more mileage out of the occasional "I remember doing something similar in a Cobol application in the late '80s" story.
You are right that Tarsnap's website does a terrible job communicating the value. You're wrong about everything else. But I'm glad Colin is getting the data point here.
Ok, thanks for the feedback.
So people pay them to host recipes on their server (and training).
Since the software is open, why wouldn't I host my own chef server and not pay them?
why do you want customers with lots of data and little money?
On a similar tangent, I'm actually travelling to the states for PAX coming up next week, and I tried to get something set up for roaming data with my carrier, Virgin:

http://www.danhulton.com/blog/2010/08/26/mitigating-exhorbit...

The short of it is, I have to pay $6 per MEGABYTE of roaming data I accrue, even if it's on Viring US's network. And I'm LUCKY. If I didn't have a smartphone, I could be paying $15 for the first megabyte, and $0.05 per KILOBYTE thereafter.
And many Java programmers doing FP programming unknowingly when writing an Ant script.
And not just in the startup world, either. I've been through several -- on both the M and the A side -- in the high-tech manufacturing sector and the billion dollar deals are no different than the million dollar deals. 99% of the time, someone is getting screwed.
They do sure take their sweet time with the new version.

In the meantime we're catching quite a few of former CR users on http://www.blurrypeople.com . Which, ofcourse, is a little
more extensive compared to CR 1.0.

(Also see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1626783 )

[Edit: grammar]
You have to bring $100,000 of your own personal money into the company (so investment from 3rd party doesn't count).

You also have to maintain control of your company, ie you can never give away more than 50% of the equity in the company - and that will be prohibitive when seeking investment.

The company is thus limited in it's ability to fundraise above a certain point and an exit is impossible without the founder leaving the country.
I pay $25/year for Flickr Pro, which is almost exactly $2/user/month.
How do you position windows on Mac without a mouse?
Hmm, I think we need to change the copy. Everyone says it's the same as instapaper, even though there's no overlap... Thanks for your input!
Don't forget that a large portion of Africa has the climate and soil of Brazil. If we (Brazilians) export this technology to Africa it would: feed all the humanity for years to come, reduce Africa poverty, and be a great source of biofuel.
Towards the end of his entry he mentioned something about readability. I believe postfix notation is superior in both read & write-ability for FP.

Take:
(reduce (lambda (x y) ...) (map (lambda (x) ...) data-set))

When you actually read this what do you do? You work inside-out to understand it. You figure out what 'data-set' is, then you figure out what '(lambda (x) ...) does to it, and so on.

You (or me at least) also write the code inside-out. You start with the data, and an idea of how to transform it, and you work your way towards that transformation.

Compare to:

((data-set (lambda (x)...) map) (lambda (x y) ...) reduce)

Of course, this brings up a lot of edge-cases. Ex.: Where does 'define' fit into this? You really want define and the variable name at the beginning.
Welcome to the party, Jacques! I think you and I started about the same time.

FP seems much richer than IP, but maybe that's just me. I know that once you get all the basic set operations, then you move on to continuations and Monads and it's like wow! A whole other world opens up. Then you can move on to all sorts of other cool stuff like super-scaling which kind of just "falls out" of FP. So it seems like there is more depth here for geekiness.

As far as bugs, I guess that the vast majority of bugs are related to either "state leakage" -- somebody tickling your variables while you're not looking -- or off-by-one errors. FP eliminates both of those. I know I try to stay as immutable as possible and my code feels a lot more solid than it used to.
Corn is half of the price of the 70's, but you probably has more than the double of the productivity.
Steve Jobs explains branding
It's not about the idea, or being the first, it's all about execution (and luck). FourSquare is killing it right now, but they were about the 5th major player into the geo check-in playing field. Online coupons have been around for a decade prior to Groupon. Facebook was late to the social networking party by about 5 years. There were hundreds of major search engines prior to Google. StackExchange & Quora certainly aren't the inventors of the online answers market.

Stealth mode is silly, because you need competition to validate your business. You need to learn from your competition and get feedback from the public to tweak your product. If you are the only one pursuing something, odds are it isn't worth pursuing.
I'm quite likely in the minority, but I strongly gravitate to services that 1) use a cost-based micro-pricing scheme; and 2) that I trust to not mark-up unreasonably much. Generally I want to offload the "how much should this kind of thing cost?" calculation to someone else who I can trust to calculate it accurately, add on a reasonable profit margin, and charge me that amount. I definitely avoid companies that I feel are instead trying to figure out how much they can get me to pay, and then pricing it at that.

One example, which I use for hosting, is nearlyfreespeech.net. Amazon's and Google's cloud services have a similar utility-pricing model, though I'm not sure how much I personally trust them to price in line with costs, especially whether they're going to pass on future cost decreases. Prgmr.com is a flat fee rather than a combination of micro-prices, but it has a little of the same vibe of, "I calculated how much it should cost to operate these servers, divided by the number of VPSs, added on a reasonable profit margin, and that's what I'm charging", which is one reason I went with them.

It's not even necessarily the overall price that worries me so much as liking the general warm-and-fuzzy feeling that I'm not getting a hugely marked up service. Same as when shopping for, say, a mechanic: I feel most comfortable with a mechanic I can trust to charge me what the repair costs, plus a reasonable profit, not one who's trying to size me up to figure out how much the repair is "worth to me".
This has simply not been true for me. I participated in DV lottery for quite a few years, and later on had multiple visits to US Embassy and never have had any kind of problems with getting my visas approved whatsoever.

I think your friend might be having some other issues, not the DV lottery.
If you overstay your visa, then you're absolutely right, you're in for a world of trouble.

However, ONCE you have entered the US on a B2, you can file an I-539 to permit you to extend your stay and apply to change your status to another class of visa.

As it happens, this is precisely the process I've gone through to go from B2 -> TN-1.

That said: Ben's right that you should seek legal counsel from an immigration attorney on all things related to the visa process.
As I recall, Python actually has even more detailed meta-programming abilities if you look around in it; in Python but not Ruby, a function can scan up the calling stack and determine the name a caller used for an object that the function was passed (which sounds crazy but could be nice for a DSL).

It's just that Python hasn't ever had an ethos of monkey-patching.
I'm surprised the article didn't mention that Dan Kantor (founder of ExtensionFM) is also the founder of Streampad.
Clever ads use 'Dallas' oil barron to sell solar panels
There will almost always be a lot of people thinking about and/or working on the same ideas that one is thinking about. Others working on them might have dedicated certain amount of resources to accomplish a certain pace of progress.

If one makes their plans public, it might inpsire others to bring in more resources to increase their pace and beat you to the market. In such acase all one would be doing is provide free marketing for that product.

Of course, this is just one perspective. Going public also has its advantages, just like going in stealth mode has its disadvantages, one of them being the difficulty of attracting talent.

At the end, what matters is which option one chooses to leverage that option's advantages and what one does or can do to nullify the disadvantages of the same option.
I was amazed that my entirely non technical friends had installed opera to replace the android browser. I think it was mostly that dealing with tabs was annoying, open is on my android now but a stable firefox sounds awesome.