skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Kudos to anyone bankrolling their own start, I've been part of a couple of those in the past and I hear you. My wife is trying to bootstrap a company in the same sense that you are. Instead of a million dollar investment, we've "invested" what her old salary was (she quit her job a few months ago to explore doing this).

But it's obvious that she's going to need some more money than that to hire a designer, a part-time lawyer, pay for hosting and probably get one more developer for what she wants to do...and we simply don't have the cash for that. So she's seriously thinking about looking for an investor to hire those people. A quarter million would probably cover those expenses for 18 months.

I don't know what to call that, "investor assisted bootstrap"?

It's definitely a different model than "I have an idea, give me money, I'll go hire 20-30 people and we'll make a go at it for a year", which is certainly not bootstrapping.

My own company tried that "instant company model" a few years ago and it didn't work out, so we reconstituted the company with different leaders and different VCs, and now are following this hybrid mixed bootstrapping model...and you know what? We're doing much better.
Building the minimum viable SaaS team
When I came out of school, my English was fairly good for a non native speaker. But then I started blogging and I can't even believe how much it has helped me. With time I blogged less and less. And I realized my English is not improving anymore. So I agree that blogging is really a good way to improve your English.
Ech. If you want to improve your writing, please do NOT read Strunk and White. It might make you feel better that you are following what are supposedly "the rules" but your actual writing will not improve. http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/24/happy-birt...
This is definitely an issue, though it seems Samsung are pushing for something that is more easily holdable in one-hand - compare to a paperback book or a Kindle.

I haven't used one yet, but I can see this being a lot easier to hold with one hand and type with another, when in a crowded tube or train, for example.
Definitely not the article you want to read because it is 4 in the morning and you can't sleep... shit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fmri is useful in diagnosing personality disorders
So if you ask them nicely not to be bottomfeeding scammers, they'll be happy to oblige, effective immediately and permanently, for your documents.
Get a co-founder?

No, really.. I think that being able of finding / attracting a great co-founder is one of the "need to have" features of an entrepreneur.
Of course she doesn't respond. Ignore the trolls.

It's too early to call this a success. But she's indicating exactly the kind of attitude that will increase the chance of success (ignore the praise and the detractors, focus on the work) and you berate her for that.

I think that's pretty cheap.

If you found your technical co-founder through HN then chances are that person has a lot more in common with Jessica Mah than with you, to slap the one is to indirectly slap the other.

Not everybody has enough money that they could pursue their ideas 'out of pocket' and to see someone that young pick up an investment this size serves as a validation of the fact that age does not matter in the start-up scene, and neither does your pocketbook. I think that's really inspiring for those that are young and not too wealthy, it shows that hard work is rewarded.
Talk to a rubber duck - it's not just for technical problems. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RubberDucking

I take a walk and observe nature, the smallness of myself and how little control I have over the rest of the world - yet everything keeps going.
Go to a cafe, go to the supermarket - even a DVD is good for a change in a sense of place. Making progress on 'unimportant' side-projects is very encouraging. Making progress on little utilities (like bash techniques) is very satisfying, and even marginally justifiable. Make time to do things that you think are really cool.
Credit yourself for each little step of progress you do make, by comparing with where you were before that step - you did that! (when focussed on the big, distant goal, it's easy to not notice the progress that we do make. But the journey of 10,000 miles is made of steps.)
99-cent TV episodes at Amazon
More Nonsense with Breach Numbers
Medical transcription billing
It's common here because it's important. This article was not reporting on a study with facts, they are proffering advice that they do not follow. I don't care why they didn't follow it, if you had time to make pretty graphics you have time to tweak and test the CSS on your site. Nor is this breaking news that the public needs to know at 3:48pm on Wednesday rather than 6pm on Friday.

Sometimes they are actually written well enough or are so misleading that you don't even notice these things. I went to this article looking for affirmation of my own opinion (I happen to agree with the headline) and thanks to confirmation bias did not notice the comment form, and might have even bookmarked it or sent it along. Thankfully someone saved me a future embarrassment by pointing out that it's worthless as evidence, which is a large part of why I read the HN comments...
How do I politely decline building stuff for relatives/friends?
Okay we try again. If he didn't wish he could downvote stuff, he hasn't got a need for a service that takes his downvote into account.

The long term cookie isn't really that important for vote counting perspectives but to be able to find out whom to serve the personalized stuff to. It is essentially no different from hn which also sets a cookie when you login, except that if you erase the cookie, you can get it set again when you log in, which wouldn't happen in my example.
Never take a counteroffer. It is not a win-win proposition.
No, it's just that there is a 'too few females in tech' post every other day, so I think that it is good to see some balance to that.

For the record, the young males impress me just as much from a business point of view, it's just that for some reason young females succeeding in the tech world are much more rare.
Google To Steve Jobs: No, We Aren't Lying About Android Activations
I have to say that, while this makes sense on one level ("Practice makes perfect"), on another level it is dangerous. Let's say you have horrible grammar, bad ideas, and poor planning. Is it a good idea to plaster your blog posts on the internet? No.

As someone else said, "Read, read, read" is a guaranteed winner. Also reading books on how to become a better writer will help.

There's definitely a minimal level of skill needed before you start "Writing, writing, writing".
I guess it depends on your use case. My primary use would be reading and watching videos while on the move. For that the iPad as always seemed slightly too big, and this looks like a much better size. Most people I know who own an iPad generally leave it at home and rarely carry it around with them. For me that would defeat much of the purpose of buying a tablet.
Lexical vs dynamic scoping in Lisp ...
The first Lisp I ever used was LispKit. Over one weekend I implemented the SECD engine in BCPL, then by hand compiled the LispKit definitions of eval and apply into SECD code and typed them in. Hey Presto! Running Lsip.

But LispKit Lisp used dynamic scoping. If you have an unbound variable in an expression it uses the definition that was in force at the time of the call, not the definition that's in scope from the text of the surrounding code. This was incredibly useful at times, but made debugging and analysis difficult.

To the best of my (very limited) knowledge, modern Lisps use lexical scoping. Are there any current Lisps that use Dynamic scoping?

I could find that out for myself with a lot of searching and reading, but what I really want to know is this:

Do any of you use a system with dynamic scoping?
There must be a middle ground: a screen that is visible without looking at ourselves, as well as a screen that doesn't resemble a minor environmental catastrophe.
Reach for your goals. Have them present all the time.
This will help you refocus when you seem to lose faith...
Take a break. Sometimes I am frustrated and i just go out to watch some planes landing and taking off(I live near an airport). This little move is enough for me to recharge and think what's ahead and why i'm doing this...
Ultimately don't give up!
The Galaxy S has a one-click root exploit and then you can run what you like.

(Have to say, though, the Samsung Android version is surprisingly good).
Overall, I agree with you, but there are a couple of observations that renders the article out of the completely bogus realm:

Marketers are spending money on iDevice apps at the expense of improving their mobile Web sites that everyone with a smart phone can access.

True.
I guess it's mostly a matter of visibility rather than using the appropriate technology.

App business is a bubble? Nah, I don't think so.
I meant that the chemical dispersants need to be cleaned up too. Just because they're not black and gooey doesn't mean we should ignore them. Good PR on BP's part.
I dunno, but I think the whole "we are young kids" may be counterproductive in this instance.

It'll be great for getting coverage...but would that coverage be more or less effective? Would a 50 year old business owner who sees coverage in Wall Street Journal really want to put his business financial tracking in the hands of a bunch of kids who refuse to get off his lawn?
Or better yet, you could create an app for this totally free system called the web, you wouldn't need anybodys approval and every level of supplier you would need (from domain registration to hosting to software to run your servers) are a commodity market or open source and so are actually beholden to their customers more so than Apple and facebook are.

Even better there is nobody who can tell you what kind of technology stuff you have to work with, nor is anybody going to demand 30% of your income (except the taxman - set of an offshore account before you start to make money).
Very little, my .emacs just loads a whole load of other .el files. There's quite a lot in them though :) Here's a very very useful few lines if you're on X Windows:

; Fix copy-paste between emacs and other x programs
(setq x-select-enable-clipboard t)
(if (functionp 'x-cut-buffer-or-selection-value)
(setq interprogram-paste-function 'x-cut-buffer-or-selection-value))

All your problems with cut and paste between Emacs and other programs? Gone!

The if statement stops it failing when you use it on other platforms.

EDIT: I also really really like this bit which I've not seen in other peoples lists:

(defun eshell-goto-current-dir (&optional arg)
(interactive "P")
(let ((dir default-directory))
(eshell arg)
(eshell/cd dir)))

(global-set-key "\C-cs" 'eshell)
(global-set-key "\C-cS" 'eshell-goto-current-dir)

That means I can switch to eshell with C-cs or a can switch to eshell and change the current directory to be the same as the file I was viewing with C-cS. It also passes through the argument so I can have multiple shells open and use the numeric argument (M-1, M-2 etc) to select them.
1. Practice makes perfect. Yes, others are right in telling you to read a lot, but reading alone won't improve your writing much. You have to write and more importantly, edit what you wrote. Write a blog post, wait a day or so, and edit it — make it as short as you possibly can without losing the message.

2. I found the Economist Style Guide (http://www.economist.com/research/styleguide/) to be quite helpful. Strunk & White is useful, but not as a set of rules to abide by, but as a set of ideas to consider.
Windows Phone 7 – Released To Manufacturing
Pretty bad pop-sci information degradation in this slideshow. Could somebody explain to me what they think they're stating in number 9?
I'm from Eastern Europe (Lithuania) and there are local VCs here. Here in Lithuania we are constantly attacked with startup event's: BarCamps, Open Coffee Clubs, competitions that tries to find out those talents and etc. I'm ignoring them actually but for my own reasons.

As far as I know Poland is place to look if you need bigger money. If money really is the only reason not to make your own startup.
Stephen Hawking: God did not create Universe
Well, it is true. He's validating it with a grammar, not some adhoc parser implementation.
Motorola has launches New Milestone 2 smartphone.
Bootstrapped: Github-Social Code Hosting Service
Can you explain why 'validating it with grammar' is better than 'some adhoc parser'?

IMHO a webserver is one of the things you want to be relaxed, laid back, and basically not care if the client gets things wrong. Just serve up what they look like they wanted.
Oracle president Charles Phillips may resign, analysts say
The Quest for a Solid Ice Beer Tray
I feel you on the multiple page thing. It increases abandonment like crazy.
Here's our first hand experience:

We used to have a 5-stage ad campaign creation process in our SaaS self-service ad manager.
Once we started measuring cart abandonment rates, we noticed that users dropped off after the first 2 steps.
It gets even worse if you require users to sign-in first

The solution:
1. We replaced it with a 1-page process
2. This is the crucial bit. We allowed users to create their ads BEFORE signing up.

By seeing a live preview of their ads, we engage them early and dramatically improve conversion rates.

The morale of the story is that keep the steps short (even if the form is long) and provide instant gratification.

Here's a link to the form on our demo site :
http://demo.trafficspaces.com/advertise/cart/new/?adspid=153...
Easy, say yes but that you will not have time until September next year.

It's the same as having a hairdresser, dentist or a doctor in the family. Everybody wants a piece of their time at birthday parties to get a free consult, being the family geek is no different.

Only misery can come out of it because at 'free' the feature list is infinite and I don't like charging my relatives.

So I give them the address of a friend that builds websites for a living and they get a discount large enough that if it's serious they'll go for it.
BCS Council opens elections
Advertising Standards Authority targets Twitter advertising
Why Develop Apps for Android?
Networks – not size – give cities competitive advantage
One good thing about a serious (with a brand name and TV adverts etc.) iPad competitor in the market is that, like Tim does here, you can now have an actual conversation about "what are tablet computers (good) for?" without it becoming an Apple vs the world fanboy battle.
Fedora: Trademark defense -- you can help
I think this is a good time to launch a new news aggregation site. Reddit has "jumped the shark" so to speak and I think there is a large chunk of displaced users looking for an outlet. That brings up the third problem with these sites, how to gracefully get bigger without quality dropping. Of course Reddit did in a sense solve this problem by allowing Reddit itself to be the next solace for displaced people, they just jump down into a deeper/more obscure subreddits.
Do you need to take actual credit cards and swipe them? Or is it just cash?
I highly, highly recommend it. The basic thesis is that fearlessness is, if not the key, then one of the keys to 50 cent's success. The reference to '50th law' is also a nod to Robert Greene's book, The 48 Laws of Power.
and I can attest moonlight doesn't render the same as silverlight. All it takes is one ChildWindow in your app to show that.
Here in Hungary I don't know about any VC which would consider funding small software startups with realistic terms or would have the competency to understand this market. (An if I don't know about them that means they are incredibly incompetent marketing themselves on the internet, which simply means they are incompetent.)
I am bootstrapping anyway. I just mentioned that it would be a bit easier if funding would be a more efficient market. And it would be a cool thing not only for startups but also for people who are not professional investors and would want to invest directly into startups only small amounts.
I just did the math, and at 99 cents I would save money over having cable.

Unfortunately, only the older shows are 99c, never the current show. And only for some channels. New HD episodes are $3 each.

Most shows I will never watch again, and I generally know which ones they are by halfway through the first season. I generally buy the DVD or Bluray of these.

If Amazon was offering rentals for half the price of purchases, I'd probably go for it. It'd cost a little more than cable, but I wouldn't have to run a DVR or worry about whether I marked my favorite shows or deal with the times when the DVR fails to record for various reasons.

But paying 3x as much isn't in the cards for shows I'll never watch again. And for shows I will, how do I know they won't kill this service in a year... Right when I want to re-watch my purchases.
PSGroove PS3 jailbreak in action
Ask HN: StackOverflow for projects
I'm one of those people who has more ideas than I probably have hours left in my life to implement. I would be willing to pay to have some of them done though. Does anyone know of site where people can present ideas and collaborate with people to get them implemented? Something that people could organize around, planners, people willing to pay to have the idea done (if relevant) and people willing to do it. If there isn't such a thing, perhaps the stack overflow template could be used to make one [1]?

I know about sites like rentacoder but I'd rather my project ideas didn't have to compete with the endless "please make me a facebook clone" requests, etc. Ideally I'd like an audience closer to HN's.

[1] By one of you, not me. And this one I wont pay for because I think it could be big enough that the one who did do it could potentially do very well with advertising.
I've read the introduction and I still don't quite know what the fuss is all about.

Perhaps some examples of its benefits right in the introduction?
Almost half the weight (380g vs 730g), but smaller screen (7" vs. 9.7"). Maybe this makes it even more squarely a "big iPhone", neither fish nor phone.
You have no reason to suppose he was being manipulative. You'll be happier thinking good things about people, instead of second-guessing everything they do.
I've dove deep into Silverlight as the company I work for has me writing an extensive Silverlight app. I do question the choice of Silverlight and Silverlight's future on the web everyday because I have yet to come across something we are doing in SL that couldn't be done in HTML and Javascript.

I have changed my tune a bit though as I've come to appreciate Silverlight is extremely well designed and extremely powerful. Does Silverlight really have a compelling, deep future on websites? Eh, I don't know. Should Silverlight have some kind of compelling worthwhile future, be it on phones, tablets, media centers and desktop apps? IMO, absolutely, it's a superb platform. For example, if Windows Phone 7 can gain some marketshare, I'll be tickled. As I'd take Silverlight over CocoaTouch any day.
First, thanks!

From your commit log:

> Disable target install-py for now, it requires sudo.

Agreed: re: disabling app that needs root unnecessarily. I don't want anything fucking with my OS python.

Have you considered having it simply call pip instead, so it installs to the current virtualenv?
Pushdo takedown may yield valuable data about how botnets work
I am simply impressed at how much sh*t he gets done. I honestly want to be more like him
How to Remember People's Names
> If you really have lots of questions to ask the users, don't do it all in one go

This doesn't apply to all cases. It works well for sign-up forms but there are cases in which it's better to focus on early user engagement at the expense of a short form.

For example, in cases where the user is expected to create or design something for use later, it makes sense to immerse them in the creation process even if it means your form is longer than normal.
The key thing, imho, is to keep the number of pages down to 1 (or max 2) and give live feedback.

More details in my earlier comment:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1655871
Cool picture but I have no idea what any of that is. Obviously rice 3 of the plates have what I would guess are eggs, beyond that there are some random vegetables about like putting lettuce, tomatoes and pickles on a hamburger.
Practise! But others have said that already.

I'd like to add that George Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language" makes a few good points that may help improve your writing:
http://wikilivres.info/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Languag...
I saw on this page a link to another story titled "Hawking warns over alien beings" and it made me wonder... do most people that don't believe that God created the universe believe in aliens? And if not, why?
Well they're using Scala in production now, so if they wanted to use Mongrel2 messaging, they probably can.
Disclaimer: I'm an Italian guy living in Switzerland since ever :)

----

Read a lot, but more importantly, write a lot.

90 % of the things I read online or offline are written in the English language.

I blog in my free time, and I once was at your position, too, so I decided start to write all the posts in English. It helps. Really. Try to write as much as possible in English.

I'm benefiting a lot from both these facts. Read as much as possible in English; get your daily news from the NY Times, read technical blogs written in English, etc.
Try to write as much as possible. Keep a diary in English; try to answer questions over at StackOverflow; try to comment on articles posted here on HN.

You should also adjust your environment to support you with learning the language. For example, I've installed Lauchy (http://launchy.net) and I've set up a shortcut to http://dict.cc; I launch Launchy, type in d myword and get an English translation of myword. I'm pretty productive thanks to this little shortcut, and I'm constantly learning new words.
same here... but until I clicked on the link and saw how much it's been expanded.

even future reposts of this link (say per 6 months or so) won't hurt HN; it looks like GCU will turn into a huge resource.
Cash only.

Thank you for your comment.
Pretty sure it's just the normal "works only with IE" stance of most Microsoft stuff. I did some testing with Firefox and Sharepoint for work to see what doesn't work and it's fairly extensive. The worst issue stopping non-techies is that the rich text editor for textareas doesn't work in FF, you have to type in raw HTML. Pretty much a showstopper. This was SP 2007 btw, not sure if 2010 is any better. The blog and wiki features in SP2007 felt tacked on and incomplete to me anyway.
WATCH NFL BETWEEN DETROIT LIONS VS BUFFALO BILLS STREAMING ONLINE FREE IN HD
DATE: 2-09-2010<p>START : from 6.30:00 PM (ET)<p>COMPETITION: The National Football league<p>COMPETITORS: DETROIT LIONS VS BUFFALO BILLS<p>Week 4 – NFL Preseason 2010 LIVE<p>Stadium:FORD FIELD
I used to have more, but I have since streamlined...

My entire .emacs file:

(defun sbcl ()

(show-paren-mode)

(setq inferior-lisp-program "sbcl")

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/emacs/slime")

(require 'slime)

(slime-setup))

(sbcl)
Ask HN: Easy to understand A-Z guide on startup funding
When pg published his article on 'High Resolution Fundraising', I was barely able to follow along. Then Patrick posted his explanation - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1655325 - and the clouds parted.

However, convertible notes are just one facet of this whole process. Is there a guide somewhere that explains all the jargon, math, variables etc of startup funding in an easy-to-follow manner like Patrick's post?
When college grads return to the nest