skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Too cool, I signed up and will be waiting for my 'go-ahead' mail. Also signed up for the api, I have a nice little command-line tool in mind that I'd like to build. When can we expect API access? :)
Mint is for intents and purposes unkillable - the undead of the plant world. I've found that thyme and oregano are also really tough. They shrug off a Minnesota winter like it was nothing and claw their way through dense weed cover.

Another unkillable plant I like is horseradish. It's deliciously spicy fresh from the garden and it simply won't die. Be careful if you plant it in a garden: it spreads like mad and it's really hard to stop because it grows underground.

This all reminds me I need to go tour the back of my property and see if the wild raspberries and grapes are fruiting yet!
A noble effort, but "begging the question" is destined to go the way of split infinitives....
I know several designers who use AutoCAD (and other CAD programs). There are more types of design than doing web pages you know.
Tech guy looking for business person co-founder
Hi.
I have quite unusual problem.

I've been a web developer for 5+ years and I can say that I became a PHP (and LAMP in general) guru.

I can build any kind of web application and I had experience handling website with thousands of visitors per hour.

On the other hand, I'm an 'entry-level entrepreneur'. I'm finishing my MBA at Babson College with concentration in Entrepreneurship and I'd like to start a company after graduation.

Right now I'm working on a prototype of one idea that I think is great (yeah, of course, everyone thinks his idea is great). My problem is that I can't implement it on my own. I can build the whole application from scratch, but I can't sell it neither to customers nor to VC's. I'm just not that kind of guy. So I need somebody to team up with, but I just don't know where to look for. My college is one of the options, but so far I had no luck...

Can anybody suggest the best strategy of finding a good BUSINESS co-founder? I know there are a lot of people looking for technical co-founder but where are they??

It's probably the biggest decision I have to make now and I want to do it right.

Thanks.
Companies Short Freelancers $4.7B in New York Last Year
I can type much faster using my iPad's QWERTY keyboard than that person did on that tablet in the demonstration video... Plus, I'm not sure how useful this sort of app would be. iOS does not have support for custom keyboard as far as I know, so the keyboard would be limited to the actual FrogPad app.
As a .NET developer for Autodesk Revit (and soon to be Autocad) I am interested to see if they are going to make us rewrite our applications in a different language to be compatible with the Mac.
Go straight to your well funded competitors. They'll love the chance to talk acquisition more than likely.
I think there’s something missing here. “Oppression” need not be some active conspiracy to keep a group down. There are all kinds of emergent oppressive social phenomena which arise from economic inequality and differential interactions based on group.

There are many possible reasons that the American justice system is much tougher on blacks (higher percentage of interactions with police relative to the amount of illegal activity – especially w/r/t drug offenses – higher percentage of arrests relative to the number of interactions with police, higher percentage of trials relative to arrests, higher percentage of convictions relative to trials, stiffer sentences relative to number of convictions for identical crimes) than on whites, which I’d speculate include but are not limited to: (1) blacks live in neighborhoods with higher crime and neighborhoods more hostile to the police, (2) the harsher treatment of blacks by the justice system is taken (perhaps subconsciously) by authorities to imply that they are deserving of this treatment ("more dangerous" or whatever) or perhaps just making those authorities used to the difference thereby perpetuating it, (3) blacks have more fragmented families than whites relative to income, partly because of these prison differences and because family instability persists across generations, (4) the black subculture (language, mannerisms, etc.) is seen as inferior by the dominant culture and blacks who interact with authorities are perceived as less intelligent or less articulate than they truly are because of these differences (5) blacks live in communities where crime and prison are more common and therefore less stigmatized, (6) schools in poor black communities are less effective, with different attitudes among administrators, teachers, and students than schools in other neighborhoods, and dropping out is less stigmatized, etc. etc.

Many of these differences are not conscious oppression, necessarily: it’s hard to fault a cop for being more on edge in a really dangerous neighborhood, for example, and that increased edginess is necessarily going to impact innocent people; biases related to the use of non-standard dialects (“ebonics”, etc.) are extremely difficult to overcome, and at a couple of points I’ve been shocked with my own bias after figuring out that someone I was talking to was smarter and more perceptive than I gave him credit for, simply based on dialect... and I try really hard to avoid such judgments.

Anyway, the point is, society is complicated, and simplifying big parts of it down to condescending offensive explanations, even if they sometimes have bits of truth to them here and there, is a good way to make people either pissed off at you or dismissive, without really advancing productive discussion.
I guess he pulled the plug on the way out
How to Turn E-Commerce Shipping Into a Competitive Advantage
This is one of those ideas that's obvious as soon as you read it - congrats, Dan.

However, it really needs to support multiple accounts from the same service.
This article could be titled '5 Reasons Why Every Person Should Get Married'. None of those benefits are specific to entrepreneurs. And marriage clearly isn't for every person, nor does every marriage offer all of those benefits. In fact, I would say a vast majority of marriages don't even bat .400 on that list. I'm not being cynical here; my marriage is terrific, but I'm also pretty sure we're in the minority.
Microsoft Unveils New Xbox 360 Wireless Controller
Google was founded to solve an engineering problem. Digg was founded to solve a social problem. Their respective cultures aren't surprising.
> It would be nice if you could provide an example

For me personally the main source of unhappiness is error messages. In C I can say

if (!(f = open(name, "r"))) die(name);

where die is a tiny function that prints name, followed by whatever strerror has to say to the subject, formatted in the usual fashion. One line, done with it. The obvious, conventional Python equivalent is four lines long because both try: and except: insist on a line of their own. Since I cannot tell Python to produce succinct unixy error messages instead of rambling stack traces I have to catch and examine more or less every plausible exception. Some exceptions I can deal with close to the base level of my call stack in a butt-ugly fourty-line catch-all clause but a large proportion of my syscalls end up taking three lines extra each. I know it's a trivial problem, but I agree with pg you tend to get the more productive the more of your actual application logic you can see.

> I do a lot of coding in common lisp

We did experiment with clisp a while back; it turned out not to be a natural fit for problems that involve a lot of pathname, datetime, and stat info manipulation. If there was a reasonably modern Lisp that let me say things like (localtime (nth 9 (stat "/foo"))) I would go looking for it this very afternoon.
Sounds like you are describing Revit, apart from the cross platform thing.

- can link in/import a number of existing file formats
- can cut sections as you described
- API is well documented and in .NET which lets you program in C#, F#, VB, C++ and any other language which runs on the CLR.

Great product, which improves dramatically in each release (so if you only looked at it a few versions ago, try again). It will cost you more than $1000 though!
And we (the citizens) are paying for it, shouldn't we be able to extract as much value from it as we can? (Or better yet, be able to volunteer time to make it better?)
6 little social networks to watch
HN might benefit from that.
I'm not sure I'd agree with this. Digg seems to be more sophisticated technology wise than pretty much any competing site. Besides some basic scalability issues and a few bugs when launching a new features, all these sites don't require much in terms of engineering. It's much more a question of content programming and community building. Reddit and Hacker News may look successful because of an engineering culture, but I'd wager that's more about having a strong identity than the site's underlying technology.
At least when it comes to internet culture, it's where a lot of stuff originates these days--- the same jokes and memes will eventually filter down to digg/reddit/elsewhere a bit later. Sort of the role that SomethingAwful, Fark, and digg have played at various times, to various extents.
Not just you. Techcrunch had an article on it a few days back: http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/26/digg-fail-ox/
I've got to ask why sell? If it generates 2 million in profit a year, it should be generating plenty of cash to bank roll your next endeavor.

Since you are the only one maintaining you can simply hire 2-3 people to do the work you are currently working and keep the rest of the profit. Most people here would kill to have a business that is generating 2 million in profit.
Kudos to those who participated in the studies (particularly the Japanese study). They sounded extraodinarily uncomfortable. As odd as it sounds, I'm thankful for the lengths some will go for science (I'm going to pretend this was the motivation).
Probably soil composition. I've noticed wide variation in taste of carrots from different parts of my garden. I don't bother growing them anymore because they are so picky about good soil.
ISTR that it was R14 that was all c++/VBA but it's been years since I touched autocad.
This is Chromium's stated goal: "Join us in an open-source browser project to help move the web forward" http://code.google.com/chromium/
This is a perfect example of how math is very simple. It just isn't always simple in a way our brains are wired to naturally follow. With the result that when people "get" a concept, they beat themselves up for not getting something so simple.

Implicit differentiation is simple in that way.

Let's take your example. xxy = 5. This implicitly defines some function y. xxy is an expression. And 5 is another expression. And the two are equal for all x. Now note that you can differentiate any expression you want to. For instance the derivative of xxy is 2xy + xxy'. And the derivative of 5 is 0.

The entire idea of implicit differentiation is this. If two expressions are the same for all x, then they have the same tangent lines, and therefore the same derivatives. Thus you don't need to solve for y first. You can just differentiate and solve for y' instead. This is convenient when y is difficult to solve for.

In this case you find that 2xy + xxy' = 0 so xxy' = -2xy and so y' = -2y/x.

That's all there is to it.

Now two notes of interest. The first is that regular differentiation is really just a special case of implicit differentiation. We get y=f(x) and differentiate both sides to get y'=f'(x). The second is that equations like y' = -2y/x are the start of a very important subject called differential equations.
Lispers rightly tout the malleability of the syntax as a killer feature. The big problem is that any language you build in lisp is still pretty much lisp. If you're not already sold on s-expr syntax, and a lot of programmers, rightly or wrongly, don't like it, the fact that you can replace one s-expr syntax with another just isn't that convincing.

The irony here is that lisp's syntax will probably keep it from ever falling into obsolescence because it can adapt to any new general task but it will also prevent it from ever really breaking into the mainstream because for any particular task it's a non-optimal syntax and a steady procession of more specialized alternatives suit most people's needs better.
Hey I'll help with the maint if you are looking for somebody ;)
That's not really how it works. The more poor, the more financial aid is available. And one of the things we're implicitly calling into question is how many people need or even can benefit from a $200K college degree.

If you're just getting the new replacement for a high school degree, say the generic business degree, you can go to lower tier state colleges for quite reasonable sums of money.
Squat toilets are also more sanitary. I'd much prefer public toilets in the US be of the squat variety.
In your example, y is a function of x. x is also a function of y. If you pick a value for x, there is a unique y that satisfies the equality. If you pick a value for y, there a unique x that satisfies the equality. Let's find y as a function of x

x^2y = 5 => y = 5x^-2 <------ this is y(x)

That's all it means. This a function, because as mentioned, x uniquely determines y.

Now let's look at an example where y is not a function of x - the standard example of a circle of radius r:

x^2 + y^2 = r^2

solving for y gives

y = +- sqrt(r^2 - x^2).

This is NOT a function, because for a value of x, we don't know which value of y to choose - it could be the positive case or the negative case. Geometrically, this means a line (like y = c) can intersect the circle in two places, so trying to find the single intersection point is not well defined.

But the gradient y' IS a function, a function of both x and y and we can find it by implicit differentiation (with respect to x):

2x + 2yy' = 0 => y' = -x/y <---- this is y'(x,y)

Geometrically this means that given a point (x,y) on a circle, the gradient is a well defined quantity, even though y(x) is not.

------------

Also: I had a look at your submission history and I really don't think that HN is the right place for most of your questions. I'm just procrastinating by answering this. You should probably be using math.stackexchange.com or a similar site.
Not everyone affected by lax airline security/safety chooses to buy tickets...
http://www.kinomaniak.pl/film/world_trade_center/world_trade...
http://www.twf.org/News/Y2003/0815-Lockerbie.jpg
Your question is a little vague, but I'll try.

What it is: Differentiate both sides of an equation. That's it.

Why it works: When two things are equal, if we transform them in identical ways (being careful about what "identical" means), then the results are equal. So if two differentiable functions are equal, then their derivatives must be equal.

What it's good for: In spite of all the carefully selected examples we're given in calculus class, the fact is that solving equations is often very difficult, and usually impossible. So if someone writes some "f(x,y) = k", and asks you to solve for y in terms of x, well, in general, you can't do it.

Now, suppose you want to find dy/dx in the above situation. The "usual" way is to solve for y and then differentiate. But what if you cannot do that? If you can find the derivative, w.r.t. x, of f(x,y), then you can apply implicit differentiation, to get something like g(x,y)*dy/dx + h(x,y) = 0. Then finding dy/dx is easy.

So: What it is good for is finding a derivative while avoiding the pain (or the impossibility) of solving an equation.

Of course, that leads to the question of what derivatives are good for, but I'm hoping you have some inkling of the answer to that one. If not, then back up, and learn more about derivatives.
Have you been approached by any VCs in the past? I would revisit that if possible.

In my experience, there is no shortage in VC contact for any, even modestly, profitable business online. So, I am sure you've heard from at least a small handfull.
I use debuggers as ways of inserting print statements into the code, without knowing what exactly I want to print before running it.

So, it goes something like this:

1. Insert `import pdb; pdb.set_trace()` into the code where I think there's an issue.

2. `print foo`

3. Hmm, that doesn't seem right... `print baz(foo)`

4. Ah, I needed to change... tabs over to editor

This style is heavily influenced by the fact that I primarily program in Python and Ruby, where one generally learns the language by typing commands into a REPL, rather than executing a file. When working on a Python project with a bunch of classmates who were good programmers, but used to Java and C++, I found that they found this approach utterly unintuitive.
For SMS I know of TextSecure http://www.whispersys.com/ on Android--though I've never used it and haven't researched its security. (I do use OTR through Pidgin/Adium.)
Costco (though you pay to be a member, so not much room to complain) and Fry's electronics are the two I have had experience with.
Where in Canada are you based? Your options may vary if you're in a big market (TO, Vancouver, Montreal...) or not.

That said, I'd imagine your best route is to find local investor/angel/business-mentor types who can recommend a firm that specializes in getting companies acquired. I'm based in Vancouver, and my business partner has definitely had getting-to-know-you meetings with a law firm - recommended by an investor - that handles that sort of thing.
Yes but Android is a competitor to WebOS, so I was thinking more about how Google "feels" about its technologies being used in competitor's products.
It just came back up.
Ask HN: Feedback on privately hosted web analytics (Piwik) idea
Well, if your corporate office is in e.g. India, at least.

So this whole hullabaloo is just about whether or not India will be able to sniff messages going through RIM's servers? (I think I've seen this referred to as BIS?) Do they just want the ability to do this without having to go through procedures first with RIM; that is, without telling RIM that they're going to decrypt messages?
This shouldn't be of any shock to anyone. Rose is not a CEO type and has admitted so in the past. When he launched Digg he promptly went to his known acquaintance, Jay Adelson, to lead the company while he remained as the chief architect. It was only time until he found somebody else to take control of Digg while he led the charge in his prior role.

Is it a coincidence that the replacement came in right after a poor launch? We could speculate that all day but this CEO was likely already inbound before the launch. Today just marked it official.
There are about 13,000 yellow cabs in all of NYC.

Which is the number set by the medallion system. My original point in this line of argument was that one of the main reasons cabs don't contribute to congestion in the city is because the number of cabs allowed in is capped. You're the one who wants to make that number bigger.

Also, I didn't realize that the 37'th percentile of income (36'th percentile in NY [1]) did not count as lower middle class

The labels are flexible depending on who's drawing the boundaries, I'm sure. The point is that I wasn't contradicting myself when I said your plan would both cut a certain class of jobs and increase traffic, I was simply saying that you're replacing fewer higher-paying jobs with more lower-paying ones. Where we disagree is that I think in this case that's equivalent to giving rich people a break and forcing more of the city's service workers to live further away, and I assume you don't.

If the congestion tax costs less than $24,000/year/cab, consumers still pay less for a taxi.

You're taking the savings from the medallion and labor costs that you posited above and assuming they'd be passed directly to the consumer, but that's overly simplistic. More competition means marketing costs go up, which drives the fares back up a bit. The congestion tax is presumably convincing fewer people to drive to work, which increases the demand for cabs, which drives the fares back up a bit more.

The point was not "you are wrong about consumer prices going down", it was "you have to start modeling the problem more carefully to have a meaningful conversation about it". You're probably right, consumers would save money, but again, given who the consumers are (oversimplifying: rich people), I don't necessarily see that as a good thing when it comes at the cost of cabbie pay.
Thanks for pointing this out. Looks like a promising new project, but I wouldn't say it quite mimics openPGP on thunderbird - i.e. no integration with a mail client.
That book does sound extremely interesting. Will definitely be reading that.
Well honestly it's about backing up the $300/hr rate. the job of the consultant is to come in and quickly convince the client that they not only know what they are talking about but are experts at what they are talking about. In reality you've only read the wikipedia article and a few trade publications for background, but somehow you have to convince the client that you do, in fact, know your shit.

The flash and pedigree refers to one of the ways you can convince people of your expert knowledge. People tend to put more faith into a recommendation that comes out of a Harvard grad than others, even if the Harvard grad talks completely out of their ass (pedigree). Furthermore, if the client sees that other people, just like themselves, have been paying this Harvard grad to talk out of his ass, they figure he must be a good person to have (prestige).

So in essence, the high rate of consulting comes down to the ability to say 'but we have lots of Harvard/Princeton/Yale minds working on this!' and 'No one ever got fired for using IBM'.

And that's just the way the firms like it.
The notion that things on computers are less "real" than things in the real world is one of my pet moral crusades; probably not surprising given my background. With that in mind: I don't start from the premise that ebooks should cost less than paper books.

In particular, ebook versions of reference works are more valuable in electronic form.
Poor Williams! So Rose says to the guy, "Here you go ... I broke everything and chased away our most loyal users and now I’m leaving you to stand behind it and defend it. Have fun!"
Hyper-V grows marketshare at VMware's expense
This error has always bothered me and I don't really know why. I was reminded of the site when I noticed it on Nathan Marz's latest blog post (discussed at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1650051).
Does your web service need a desktop app?
If you're on Windows, there are any number of free utilities that control the transparency of an arbitrary window. And others that can toggle any window to be "always on top", or not.

I imagine similar are available in other environments.

Particularly if Windows, just be sure to research enough to find a reputable utility, in each case; the space for such utilities contains some good ones but also numerous more dubious entries.
It's also quick to load on my iPhone and the linked articles are generally longer and easier to read on said device because there is less context switching that is slow on the device.
What a cop out. Kevin Rose has been hyping Digg v4 for months. He should stand behind his product, his vision, his creation. He should go down with a fight.
Can't afford Photoshop? Complete Roundup of Indie Graphic Software for Mac
We need Google's "Priority Inbox" for RSS feeds. The signal to noise ratio in my newsfeed "inbox" is way out of whack.
They did just fundamentally reinvent Digg. That's the problem. They went from being the largest community on the web to being an RSS reader where all the feeds suck and there's no way to change them.

(Technically you can change them, but what I'm describing is the experience that 95% of the users will now have with the site.)