skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems like you're fixated on getting into the U.S.

I've seen a lot of people in this state of mind, and it seems to me that wanting something desperately makes it hard to actually get it (it puts you in the wrong state of mind).

Focus on building a great product and don't think about being acquired. Make something people want, get users to love your product. Find ways to monetize the wealth you created.

It seems like what you're really asking is "I want to get into the U.S., can I do that by making a website and hoping to get acquired?".

I think the answer to that is "not likely".
Can use my cache also: http://viewtext.org/?url=http%3a%2f%2falexblom.com%2fblog%2f...
Cool tool. Thanks.
I personally wouldn't sign up for anything with FB connect, but who cares? Go for it. If you really must have just one form of login, then FB is by far your best shot. If it doesn't work, nothing else would have.
Indian E-Voting Whistleblower Arrested
Simple. Clean. Works.

But, I'm still not sure when I would use it. I saw on http://jotonce.com/about/ a few use cases but I can't say that I've ever needed something encrypted. This is basically an encrypted etherpad right?

Also, what is the difference between a 'passphrase' for a notepad and just a custom url key? Anyone can just type in things and try to guess the passphrase. Is it really any more secure than what other online notepads did with unique urls?
Don't make the mistake of engagement. At some point at every company I've worked for, we got lazy during the "cultural fit" part of the interviews and at least one of these guys slipped through and got hired. We usually eventually let them do something like maintain the build server or ticket tracker. That usually kept them from doing harmful stuff like alphabetizing the method names in classes or reformatting all the source code for "proper indentation". The key though, is to never engage them in a conversation. Let them go home to their silent, empty apartment and pull wings off of beetles, or whatever their true dark passion is. But don't engage. You're just better off not knowing how far certain peculiarities go...
Apple has a living, beating heart; That heart is Steve Jobs.

He is a megalomaniac, an obsessive driven by the desire to shape the world in his image. He is an artist whose canvas is metal and whose paint is code. Apple is simply a machine that turns Jobs' vision into reality. On Infinite Loop, his word is absolute.

You may love or hate that vision, but just you try and ignore it. Apple inspire many emotions, but very rarely indifference. That is the essential genius of Apple - of all computer companies, they and they alone seek not just to appeal to the intellect, but also to the emotions. No other computer company announces new products to rapturous applause. No other company attracts such vitriol, against not only themselves but their customers. No other company elicits gasps of delight and desire at their packaging.

Apple have done many things to frustrate me and anger me. They have made many decisions that I strongly disagree with. They have also made me cry with joy, on several occasions. To me, "Branding" seems far too mild a word.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndkIP7ec3O8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0FtgZNOD44
Better to describe it as a Google Lecture, because otherwise it sounds like you are talking about the Google Talk service.
Nice. Then sell to Wendy's, Burger King, Domino's, and Pizza Hut.

Buried in the middle should be a little integer linear programming for the scheduling!

The 'qualitative' stuff about the impact of weather, high school events, etc. would be more difficult, and it may be that something like an expert system would work -- typically there's not enough data for some clean statistical attack so that some expert judgment might be essential.

Uh, the $1 million a year would be for someone owning 10 McD's, not just one!

Cute.

One potentially nice part of this could be the point of sales terminals: They may have been recording data on each Big Mack, fry, etc. along with time and date. Good data to have.
I like the idea, though I can't fathom how I'd actually use it in day-to-day life.

Looks like an interesting mechanism for spam (much like URL shortening) and clandestine communications. My 2nd and 3rd "jots" (that's even catchier than "tweets") were GPG-encrypted messages with an MD5 hash for the password.

Site layout is clean and slick.

I think it has potential.
Excellent concept. Very logical and seemingly effective way of writing a specification.

I will be trying this on my next project!
For vacation only! You cannot use that for business. Being a tourist for a few weeks will not result in funding...
Google made a deal with Yahoo in June of 2000 that gave them a lot of money and a lot of credibility. Google powered Yahoo's Search results from June of 2000 until February of 2004. See http://www.google.com/googlefriends/alert2_2000.html and http://news.cnet.com/2100-1024_3-5160710.html
Unfortunately, you're wrong. Salary really only affects the upper limit of how much you're willing to pay an individual.

In reality, you pay an employee just enough to keep them happy. As long as they're below the threshold where they're worth the cost, that is. Better employees have a higher threshold, but not necessarily a higher salary. It all depends on what they need and demand - which only has a marginal correlation with actual value.

Speaking from experience - there have been a few times we've given raises to great employees who were already happy with the salary they were getting. It didn't have much of an effect, really - we would have been better off investing that money in a better work environment - which would have a much more positive effect on our employee happiness.
No. You talked about entering America for business purposes.
Can you explain what web scale /dev/null means?
> In theory - in practice, a lot of the characters require memorization instead of having any real connection to their visual imagery.

That's also a trade off. If a character has best match with visual imagery you can't write very fluent and fast. The stroke place and order has to be modified and best optimized for speed hand writing.
Great Idea.

I actually needed something like this a while ago. started using intuit's Billing Manager.

Suggestions: Tax options, custom logo, and pdf generation. Also predictive text on previously used line items stored in cache might be handy.
It was a slew of modern stuff..none of which, on its own, is particularly hard to learn, but between someone who had been doing something else for 20 years vs someone who had been doing it for 6 months...the 6 month guy was always more appealing.

I'm not just talking about stuff like NoSQL, but most had limited experience with relational databases. Not just a lack of knowledge around ruby/python but sometimes even java/c#. Web, css, javascript, mvc or any relevant high level pattern - forget about it.

So I guess, specifically, what they lacked with the general knowledge of web or mobile (what we largely hire for) paradigms, and then the entire technology stack (from view to storage) that accompanies it.

And the few who did have relevant experience, tended to be "experts"...certainly not able to go from html/css all the way to database design.
I'm curious what your rationale for this is.

Assume that from the landing page you can be confident that none of your personal information will be shared and that the application will never post anything to your wall, etc.

What's the worry? The whole point of FB connect is that you don't have to create accounts on every website you visit, while still enjoying the enhanced functionality that comes with having a "profile" on each site.

Anyways, I care because if 90% of potential users leave the landing page because they don't want to use FB connect, then that's going to pose significant problems for us!

Regardless, we are "going for it"!
You don't need to be in America or a US citizen to start a US company. The company is essentially just an entity to 'hold' the business assets so you can easily sell them to another American company.
Clickable: http://jotOnce.com
If your site causes other sites to crash, you know you've made it!
Np. I just fixed the link, previous link wasn't all there. Bad copy paste from iPhone.
It is not about age itself, it all about motivated, young software developers who will accept minimum wage.

It is almost the same story as with foreign laborers, who will accept almost any terms, that are slightly better than at their home, and they already got motivation and taken risks.

Young, inexperienced people are much easy to manipulate and control, due to their naivety, lack of market understanding and inexperience.

The same practices are used on campuses, where some professors agitate students to get a part-time jobs or a test-task, with very low, or even no payments et all, while they're collecting the result and creating products for profit.
If you honestly feel that you can't do your startup in Egypt, look to Europe as well as the US. There's a broader range of immigration policies and plenty of places with a 'startup culture'.

Alternatively, develop a model that doesn't require external funding, at least until you've got demonstrable traction. You can create a US company even without being in the US and it can sell shares as normal.

I know there's this huge pressure to get to San Francisco, but it's really not the only place in the world where you can succeed.
I can't judge the impact of SarbOx.

My guess is that the IPO market remains open for a solid company -- good market position, plenty of revenue and earnings, good record of earnings. But there have not been very many such companies built, even private where SarbOx doesn't apply.

My take is that we need to do better at building solid companies. I'm trying. I know some people I'd like to have on my Board, but I don't see any in a venture firm. Sorry 'bout that.

This should be "the best of times" due to a 1 TB Seagate drive for $60, an Asus mobo with a dual core AMD for $100, plenty of GbE, fantastic 'framework' software -- I'm using .NET and find Visual Basic .NET to be fine. I use the compiler just via command line and think it's fine.

The US just needs to do MUCH better at building significant new companies. I've heard that SarbOx costs about $1 million a year for a company to follow it. For a significant company, okay.

Just how VCs are going to get an exit with Facebook and Twitter I don't know.

There is a Great Recession out there, but I sense that there is also a LOT of cash 'on the sidelines'.
Git, Mercurial, Subversion...they all work on windows, although I would leave the hosting to a good old *nix machine.
What form are you referring to? I've poked around the US Embassy Cairo site and I don't see any out of the ordinary requirements. Also, I sincerely doubt there are any forms that only have to be filled out by practitioners of a specific religion.
start business =//= start startup

business = plumbing, food stall, import/export, constulting, YC company etc.

startup = YC companies and other similar intense low odds/high reward businesses

edit: vaksel stole my thunder
The waiver program is tied to citizenship, not ethnicity or religion. Arab Muslims who are citizens of a VWP nation are just as eligible as everyone else.
Funny, I got a terrible offer from eUniverse, the predecessor to LiveUniverse. Maybe that's their schtick?

They wanted to resell my $20 shareware program (a pop-up blocker before pop-up blocking became just a feature). Their first offer was something like 25 cents a copy for each sale over a certain number and $1,500 dollars up front. I stopped returning their emails shortly thereafter.
Far and wide?

Just start with Rails Guides (http://guides.rubyonrails.org/). When you are somewhat familiar you can find details in the API docs (http://api.rubyonrails.org/).
On the other hand, a majority of YC companies over the last year or two raise significant funding pretty quickly. A modest angel round can support a spouse/kids/mortgage lifestyle.
I agree that its treatment of SSA is scanty. Muchnick, which I have started poking at, is much more thorough: The Dragon Book does go into what SSA is, but it does not tell you how to compute it while Muchnick does. However, I imagine it must have been a deliberate decision since Ullman et al. go into dominance frontiers quite readily shortly thereafter.

I admit that I skipped over the book's treatment of points-to analysis since I read the original papers by Lam and Whaley on it. Obviously, I can't speak for its treatment in the book, but I found the papers to be excellent. And indeed, one of them won a Best Paper award.
Randomly? Sure, some MIT guy made it...but this is Google we're talking about. ;)
World is much bigger than America. Of course, there are established economic clusters, like the valley, but it isn't the only destination.

Try Bangalore, India or China. Try to find a niche for your startup around your home (which means find a people with a task/problem and money and turn it into your next startup. Usually that is some internet service for an non-IT established business).

And it is also possible, but really difficult, to bootstrap yourself, if your startup idea is really innovative. Technology is very cheap nowadays.

And the last but not the least - try to find people in situation like your and cooperate and collaborate with them.

I'm personally think that geo-dispersed teams, like that one which develops FreeBSD or Webkit or Go are the answer to the problem. Communication is the key, not a connectivity.
I'd be a buyer in deals like this, where I get the seller to make the money for me to buy them. Who wouldn't?
From my perspective (early 30s), I know a ton of people who match all of these criteria. Even 4 and 5. Savings (4) can cover income risks for a time, and as it turns out, just about anyone can benefit from the PR and connections that YC provides (5). (The money, however, is almost a non-issue.)
Agreed, it's one thing if they don't want to pay say $10,000 (just a round figure for example) up front, but they should be paying a minimum of $15,000 in agreed upon installments on a contract drawn up by a lawyer or paralegal (whichever's necessary where you are).

You're totally correct, when someone expects to pay you less for you assuming more risks and liability it's a shitty deal. The response should be along the lines of 'fuck you'. If they're genuinely interested, that means someone else likely is too, someone who probably isn't trying to screw you over.

OP: If you're asking us whether this is a good deal or not, it's probably because you already know it's a crappy deal. Add 20% to your initial offer and say you're willing to take say 50% of advertising revenues as payment for maintaining the site (assuming you're making a profit off of it now). If they really believe they'll boost your readership + revenue streams then this way will negotiate out good, however that's not what it looks like they're interested in.

This is like owning an apartment building and being made a buy out offer saying "We don't want to pay the 15% down payment, would you be willing to forgo the total amount in lieu of increased pay as the super if you increase occupancy rates." It'd be a retarded offer to accept.
If you're an individual, the same law applies if you count it as a business expense. The usual disclaimers apply: I'm not a lawyer or an accountant, I'm just a sole proprietor. There's no legal distinction between being a sole proprietor with a daytime job and one without - income from your sole proprietor activity is taxed on Schedule SE for self-employment tax (Social Security and Medicare) and Schedule C for income tax from a business - and that's where this applies.

The "I'm not really a business" rule is really, really not one the IRS believes in.
quite outdated but i hope it helps http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIZlm2io2bc&feature=playe...!
I have literally never dealt with anyone at the IRS who was anything but friendly and helpful.
It's weird... the first five scenes I saw were fantastic, exotic, sharp images, and I was so inspired I sent the link to several of my family and friends. Now, I'm clicking through, and I can't find any more good ones.

Weird?
$15 dollars for a "useful" service is nothing. The average person spends that "everyday" for lunch.
The companies offering these services have to charge enough to pay for the servers, developers, tech support, etc.. and yes, also to make a profit, it is a business after all ;)
That doesn't make sense for me. First, US lawmakers don't really think that far ahead. But more tellingly, this isn't a universal requirement - it just applies to business transactions that can't otherwise be audited.

I think it's no more than what it appears to be: a ham-handed way to shore up the traceability of money flow.
I don't think your goal should be getting acquired. And many businesses are successful even in 3rd world countries.
When I said "Diaspora, not Appleseed", that was meant as clarification of intent and not as a refusal to host Appleseed instances.

That said, I'll only use Diaspora for myself, but that's based on personal preference.

I know Ruby like the back of my hand and am comfortable with Rails. Also, my site's built in Rails, so Diaspora will probably integrate nicely.
IMO, the format of this book makes sense for the context it was intended for: Stanford's course on optimizations and program analysis, where the problem sets and reading provide theoretical knowledge and the projects -- hacking on the joeq VM/compiler-infrastructure -- provide implementation experience. These distinct experiences make for a well-rounded education in advanced compiling techniques. (Disclaimer: I have not taken this course and am basing these comments on a quick look at their course Web page.)

So reading the Dragon Book is more akin to reading mathematics than reading a handbook on compiler implementation. Its treatment of data-flow analysis is another example of this: While the Dragon Book gives top-notch treatment of the mathematical underpinnings of data-flow analysis (semi-lattices, partial orderings, monotonicity, greatest lower-bounds, etc.), it does not go into how to implement an efficient worklist algorithm; it does not even mention du-chains AFAICT. At most, it suggests using a bit-set to represent the reaching definitions that enter and exit a basic block.

So I too am in agreement. But maybe this is what you want, mapleoin. If you just want to know what a reaching def is or how compiler writers know that their data-flow analysis is going to terminate, this is a book that will not bog you down with too many implementation details.
Rails is not a library. It wouldn't serve anybody to write a dissertation in every file about how that file fits into the whole framework.

Rails API documentation is far from perfect, but a surprising amount of the important stuff is covered in a few consolidated locations. The documentation for some modules is often consolidated in a more central location so you can get a better overview of the whole API. See ActionController::Base, ActiveRecord::Base, ActiveRecord::Associations::ClassMethods for example. As for I18n, well, I18n is an external gem, it is not core to Rails which is why it is not documented there.

No one is arguing that Rails API documentation is newbie friendly, but I would argue that the purpose of API documentation is not to introduce people to the framework; it's reference material. The Rails Guides are pretty good (if not lagging a bit for some aspects of Rails 3) and I would put them up against any other framework documentation I've used.
An easy(ish) Chopin nocturne is No. 6 in G minor. It's popular amongst beginner/intermediate players because it's a lot less technically difficult than his other pieces.
It's a cool idea. But the first time that I saw the homepage I had no idea what is about. You need to make it clear.

What mean "Unleash the producer in you."??

If I don't know what is for in less than 5 seconds I'll probably close the page.

Check out these ones as examples:
http://basecamphq.com/
https://www.dropbox.com/
This was great, I haven't really watched much Mixergy before.

Andrew asked good questions and the interviewee's story and the way he came to do this was pretty sympathetic. Good on him.
Yea you can just try to guess the passphrase, but if you want to make it harder you can always use a passphrase + the last 4 digits of their phone number under options. The difference between the passphrase and the custom url key is that at least for me a passphrase is alot easier to pass along. Just telling someone the password is 'house' and them having to put in their phone number is easier to pass along to a non-technical person then a custom url.
"so a request is absolutely legitimate and he shouldn't feel bad about it."

Yeah, I know what you mean. Totally agree with you.
Short answer: I use Fossil on Windows for source control for multiple projects ranging from a handful of files to hundreds of megabytes of sources: http://www.fossil-scm.org/

Long answer: It depends on what you're going to do with it. Are you looking for yourself, for personal work? Are you looking for multiple team members? Distributed? Centralized with no administrator? Centralized with an IT and administration team? Does the server have to be Windows? Does it have to support other OSes later? Does it have to integrate with a particular IDE on Windows? What about a hosted solution?

Companies with Windows development environments which I've worked at have used Subversion (and Trac) and Perforce, and I've heard of people using Microsoft SourceSafe (apparently deprecated in favor of Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management) and SourceGear Vault. Bazaar (bzr) and Mercurial (hg) also should have decent Windows support.
Every time I read Wikihow and eHow, I think "I am so glad I wasn't a credulous Middle American retiree googling their medical symptoms.". If your chest hurts, apply honey with Tylenol crushed up into it!

(Non-SEOs may not realize, but health is in the top five categories for search volume on some networks.)
Websockets are a lot of fun - maybe something like collaborative paint or some kind of multiuser game?

On a side note, anyone know of projects using nodejs in production?
Assume that from the landing page you can be confident that none of your personal information will be shared and that the application will never post anything to your wall, etc.

I wouldn't assume that. By default, I would be skeptical. I can't just trust you because you say you're trustworthy. That's why I don't use FB Connect. Well, that's half the reason. The other half is, I don't want FB to have a profile of a bunch of sites I'm a regular user on. I want to be able to say and do things on those sites that I wouldn't do on FB. Like this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1641266

edit: Good luck! Maybe I'm an outlier and it won't hurt much. But like I said, it's easily the best choice of those you have available to you.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1637368
GitHub use it for their download server - try running wget against one of the URLs they provide for downloading a tarball, you'll see it redirect to nodeload.github.com, hang for a few seconds (while they generate the file) and then redirect you to the download location.

http://github.com/blog/678-meet-nodeload-the-new-download-se...

http://transloadit.com/ are the most interesting Node.js startup I've seen.
Small business != Scalable startup