skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
3rd party plugins so that I can get evernote or snaptic or remember the milk or whatever third party content to display in there.

there are a million and one public custom data sources, don't let us be constrained by the ones you bless.

or if you don't want to deal with the security headaches, just allow a standard way for 3rd parties to inform twitter that their content is #newtwitter friendly and allow it to display formatted text.

basically, instead of using twitter through all of those sites, I just want to go to twitter and have all my content there and not be redirected all over the web (or at least have the option).

and 'lest I sound too demanding, great work and congratulations :)
It's a meaningful submission, from that submitter, on a day of massive HN introspection.
If I may ask, why is sorghum your standard example? Just because the word "sorghum" sounds so sweet (and I agree), or did you have a transformative sorghum experience as a child?
It's the least valuable commodity I can think of.
Cool beans.

What's the catch? Is it free? How long will it be free?
http://cofoundergoogledocs.com :)
I think part of it is flatter organizations and cutbacks in middle management. My manager is a VP who reports directly to the CEO; all his reports are individual contributors. He's the sharpest I've worked for, but he only hires a handful of very senior developers (unusually, I think our average age is around forty) because he wears a lot of hats and doesn't have a lot of spare time to mold journeymen to deliver well, in return for savings on salary that isn't going to be that large over time.

In a way I feel bad that we aren't doing our part to ramp up the next generation, but it would be hard to take the hit for doing so and still deliver on our current obligations. The alternative would be have his reports manage apprentices, but none of us is eager to make the compromises needed to get a stable system out of an army that's still developing good taste. If this problem is becoming acute, wages for junior devs will drop enough that someone can probably do that and eat our lunch (like outsourcing but without the language and timezone barriers).
About addressing this - does anyone know why you can't change a vote on HN? I've had several times where I meant to downvote specifically and upvoted instead by mistake; the buttons are very close together especially on a mobile device, but even on my desktop my finger has slipped.
Physical goods come with EULAs already. They should be legally worthless, of course, but they do exist.
A lot of folks misinterpreted this and I can't edit it.

A sole proprietorship, a single-owner LLC and an S-Corp are all pass-through to your personal income taxes. Meaning that in the eyes of the government you are still self-employed and need to file a 1099 and schedule C, even if you put yourself on payroll instead of paying out on draw.

I learned this the hard way.

What I'm saying is that even if you have a business entity you are still technically self employed. That is unless you have a C-Corporation or an LLC taxed as a corporation, in which case yes you can put yourself on payroll and do tax withholding and can legally be considered 'employed' by the company, however you get taxed double and face a number of costly state and federal requirements not to mention new overhead costs for legal and bookkeeping etc which is in most cases not worth it unless you are earning quite a lot of money.

But regardless, I don't know how much a mortgage company would care about such things. Maybe regular issue of a check from one company would be enough to suffice and I'm overblowing the issue...
Got to agree with this:

> But Grieselhuber argues that entrepreneurs should worry less about having "everything perfectly meet other people's criteria," and instead focus on, to quote Nike, "just doing it."

One thing that will definitely kill your startup faster than not having a co-founder is if you never attempt it because you can't find a co-founder. Like it or not, good co-founders are rare people and ones who will come on board with somebody who has nothing to show are even rarer. So just do it. Keep looking for a co-founder, for sure, but part of finding one is just getting on with it.
> Prices track value (in the abstract) and the market (in reality)

I think that's what I said. In the abstract, consumers will feel like they are getting gypped by paying for the fully unlocked part knowing that the exact same thing is available at a cheaper price -- part of the consumer's mindset will be "we know chip manufacturer A has to make a profit, but they're clearly making a profit on the cheaper part or they wouldn't sell it, the premium part then is just a con-job and manufacturer A is just getting greedy.

This reduces the desirability of the premium part. It'd be like selling a 6-cylinder car and a 4-cylinder car, only the 4-cylinder is actually a 6-cylinder with two of the pistons turned off (and can be enabled by paying some premium and having the other two pistons turned back on -- don't think something like this hasn't already been thought of in the car industry). People will just buy the 4-banger and take it to their local ricer shop and have the other two turned on and a type-R sticker put on the back.

In reality, it'll reduce the price of the premium part as demand shifts to the cheaper (but exactly the same) alternative OR, if the price of the premium part drops so low as to be extremely close or at parity with the slower part, people will stop buying the lower priced part. Either way, in reality, they should have just sold one part and not wasted everybody's time.
Trustable privacy policies
Hi, I've got a business idea that tracks user's navigation with a browser plugin. How much you would trust a web application you don't still know that does that? Privacy policies will be very restrictive for the application, is it enough? Any suggestion for very trustable privacy policies?
Thanks all
That doesn't really clarify much.
Given the likely supply-demand imbalance (more biz types/fewer technical types), it might be good to give some way for the biz types to show they are 'desirable' to help the technical folks sift through them to find the most promising.

I'm guessing there must be some legitimate assessment/test created by some credible institution to assess someone's "entrepreneurial'ness". Of course, such a test won't be infallible, but it might help attract the tech types if they can screen the biz types easily on a few dimensions.
I've written about some of this before (http://ginzametrics.com/the-royal-we-single-founder-startups...) but you bring up a good point as a lot of making this work is a balancing act. I'll write something up when I get a chance.
These chips are not "ancient architecture" Pentiums. It's because Intel branding is fucking insane. For example, the Core i3, i5, and i7 names are meaningless, except to vaguely suggest increasing performance: some low-power-draw i5 chips are put into laptops and given an i7 label.

As for this CPU, recently Intel revived the Pentium name and positioned it as a low-performance chip positioned about midway between the Celeron line and the Core i3 line.
Until Intel distributes a EULA with the processor. If the courts will hold up the validity of a software EULA, why not one that applies to hardware?

...not that I think that this is an agreeable situation. But I am hardly surprised to see things evolve in that direction.
Interesting article about a failed business, marred only slightly by the way the author wants to write off his own bad business decisions as an inevitable problem with the coffeehouse business model.

Of course it must be possible to make a lot of money with a coffeehouse; Starbucks frinstance does just great, and plenty of non-chain places must be making a lot of money too.

Many of the problems he had just sound like he didn't have enough time to optimize his business model... if he was throwing half his croissants away then maybe he should have been buying fewer croissants? And do you really need a guy in the kitchen getting paid to whip up the occasional crepe when coffee is where you're gonna make the big bucks?
basically, instead of using twitter through all of those sites, I just want to go to twitter and have all my content there and not be redirected all over the web (or at least have the option).

Just what we need, a new, centralized portal website. Oh, that reminds me, I need to go add some widgets to my iGoogle page.
That's one thing that I think needs to be explained a little better. I'm always open to working with somebody else and will be hiring at some point.

The point is that by deciding to just do it on your own if you don't have a co-founder is you remove a factor that you have little control over anyway and can focus on things you can control.
Snowflake: Twitter's network service for generating unique IDs
I'm seeing more and more of these sites/solutions spring up but none of them seem to really work.

Why?

My thoughts:

Partly an issue of signal to noise / matching, finding the right person in the first place.

Partly frustration at unsuitable cold calls through cofounder matching sites (I listed on one to see if I could find an additional technical cofounder and got a ton of business contacts in areas that were totally mismatched to my interests and skills).

Partly lack of obvious second step, in a way. Exchange emails, meet, decide what to do next (small project or something, parallel with dating pre-commitment, I suppose). But this isn't foolproof and is very high-touch. Maybe this is just me though.
One thing that is worth mentioning about pg because he is brought up in these conversations: many investors talk about investing in the team and not the product, but this is often just lip service.

PG not only actually invests in people, but is also willing to overlook his own criteria when he finds people he believes in. It's one of the things that really sets him apart.
Node.js is a lower level event framework written in Javascript and run inside of Google's V8 engine. You're probably familiar with a similar event driven javascript framework: jQuery. Node.js is like that but instead of clicks and mouseover you have streams and processes. You just attach code to these server events.

From the node.js docs:

Many objects in Node emit events: a TCP server emits an event each time there is a stream, a child process emits an event when it exits. All objects which emit events are instances of events.EventEmitter.

You will probably have to write a JSON API for your web app anyway. The advantage of Javascript is that you can push logic down to the client as well. You send the data down, and have the Javascript code running on the client insert it into the DOM directly. There are already pretty complete JS web frameworks (google it) and you can start to see that the "web app" which produces html isn't really necessary in that model.

It's all still a bit bleading edge. I don't recommend it for beginners quite yet, but keep it in mind. Your choice of which framework to learn isn't like "which house do I buy because I have to live in it forever." You can - and probably will - move soon. You're really investing in your ability to figure out web frameworks.
I've always liked this page - http://www.vendian.org/envelope/

and the dots clock is interesting as well
Reading this really makes me want to recommend the Norwegian movie Elling - it's witty, completely unschmaltzy and hints at a pretty good answer on what good care for adult mentally challenged folk looks like.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0279064/

It's streamable on Netflix for the US-based folks:

http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Elling/60025098
As someone who worked in the Boston area for a dozen years starting in 1980 and then moved to the D.C. area for a dozen years, I can tell you that D.C. is indeed not the place you want to be, especially after the telecom crash early last decade which zapped a whole swath of interesting jobs.

As far as I can tell Silicon Valley, not "the West Coast", has been the place to be, probably tracking the development of the single die microprocessor (although there are many other reasons, and some clear reasons why e.g. Route 128 all but died by the early '90s).

If I were you I'd get enough money in the bank to cover the usual contingencies and then move to SV.

The one exception is if you have a serious clearance. Ignoring for the moment that SV is reputed to be particularly bad when it comes to age discrimination, if you're approaching the 35-40 year old range and can't hide that and you want to continue programming, you need to be thinking really hard about how you'll do that. As far as I can tell, the three best ways normal mortals can are by holding a serious clearance, getting into the embedded field, or going into multi-client consulting.

But if you're somewhat before that age range, now could be a good time to try out the startup scene in SV.
If that's true, SSD will remain as the L2 cache device in the next few years. Does spindle media have theoretical limit of density?
I totally agree with you.
That is, until my son was born, and people started sharing horror stories for both sides of the argument.

As a father, some other part of me kicked in that wasn't very logical. This is much harder decision than it seems.

My mother in law shared with me her first-hand experience of 'watching-the-lights-go-out' in a healthy 3-year old minutes after she was vaccinated. It's not autism, and it's anecdotal evidence, but it made me dig deeper, and doubt any certainty on either sides.

Studies are NOT conclusive. Dozens of studies where done defending the use of mercury in amalgam fillings for example, and just now the dentist community is coming around to admitting that it does negatively impact patients' health. Years after many people were saying that, and were called naysayers.

I didn't vaccinate my son. It wasn't an easy decision. And I'm not certain of it. He will receive a shorter list of vaccines, on a longer less-stressful schedule than the one recommended by the govt.

Anybody who assumes certainty for either side of this argument hasn't given this enough thought imho
As written, this is a dangerously solipsistic statement.

I'm actually an antisolipsist, so it was written using the second-person pronoun and is correct as such. (and not solipsistic by any means)

And no, I have no idea if I am pulling your leg or not since I'm still working out all the implications of antisolipsism.
Video, demonstrating how blind iPhone users interact with the device.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_TFHqIHBqM
Maybe oEmbed support? http://www.oembed.com/
Eventually a video of the presentation will be here: http://confreaks.net/videos/363-gogaruco2010-the-shell-hater...
Well, ANY mortgage-backed security will decline in number of current mortagages -- as people pay off their mortgages or refinance. The alarming thing is not the decrease in "current" but the increase in delinquencies.
I remembered hearing that - definitely good to know people understand when to bend their own rules (more like 'guidelines we know when to break' than rules, really).
Running a DIY Git server
My great-to-the-nth grandpappy didn't claw his slimy tetrapod ass out of the Devonian sea just so his no-good descendants could sit in a cube playing Farmville all day!
They could do that with an iframe. Third parties can provide embeddable content as plain old HTML pages. No need for yet another plugin format.
Being willing to overlook your own criteria is normally just plain inconsistent.
It's a little strange to see social-networking startups founded by people who seem to have relatively little interest in social life (including the 800-lb gorilla in the market).
I find it interesting that firms choose to not hire anyone at all over hiring and training someone. That means it's either a luxury hire uncritical to the business's survival, or they equate hiring and training with a negative ROI. Or both.

To those here who run a business, is that how it is?
I think multiple founders vs. single is extremely overrated. It's a lot of work for sure, and I have to go outside my comfort zone pretty often, but I bet that's true for startups with 2 or 3 founders too.
a portal comprised 100% of content that my friends recommend? yes please!
"Civil disobedience is the active refusal to obey certain laws, demands, and commands of a government" - Wikipedia.

Based on that definition I would say those guys managed to actively disobey many laws, including the unjust and discriminatory ones.

If this one guy is hitting another guy do you have the moral right to use force to stop him? I'd say yes, or at least I'd sacrifice my moral purity to defend that person. However in the case of anonymous vs MPAA/RIAA, is there a moral right to sidestep laws (unrelated to copyright, btw) just because the MPAA/RIAA doesn't let people get movies and music for free? Copyright is different from DoS attacking. Choose what you stand for clearly. If you truly believe in DoS attacks AND anti-copyright go ahead and actively disobey both (not that you're automatically right). But if you only believe in disobeying one and breaking the other law just to further your motive in the former objective, well then that's bad.
Inicio - Cracker Cheat
hrm.... would have been nice to have seen this built on 'twiliokit' (http://github.com/mgkimsal/twiliokit) - a starter kit I put together for building twilio apps inside a pre-configured MVC framework (ZF 1.10). I guess I need to do a better job of promoting twiliokit :)

Thanks for your support-desk contribution all the same - looks nice and clean :)
He obviously tried to create not a standard a-la starbucks coffee shop, but a more luxury experience. It seems he had to revert to non-cozy and fast or to charge premium prices and try to become "fashionable" place.
Gene limits learning and memory in mice
I've done both. It is better to go single than have a founder who isn't in sync. If you can find a founder who is in sync with you, that is best. But most of the startups I've seen fail, even though the blame was placed elsewhere, really boiled down to conflict between founders. No market fit? Because the founders couldn't agree to listen to the market. Etc. Etc.
> What, precisely, has the MPAA done that is so wrong?

I know right? If they did something wrong point that out. Attacking them because you think they're assholes and you feel like it is just plain immature.
I'm the creator of efene, if you have any question let me know.
I think there is a law of diminishing returns wrt working long hours. Is working 18 hr days really more productive that 14 hr days? That train of thought is what makes it not so insane.
Air-dropping Tylenol-stuffed mice carcasses
Hard disks are getting close to the limit of perpendicular recording and will have to adopt HAMR or BPM. At least the disk vendors are used to big technology changes; AFAIK flash has been using the same floating gate cell all along.
Ok, startup idea:

Inspired by the lovely scene from the movie Amélie where the titular character takes a blind man by the hand and describes in detail how the town square looks.

Imagine an app. Blind user uses app to take a photo and instantly send an image to a mechanical Turk service which describes the photo and returns an audio file.

This could even be done without smartphones (albeit less seamlessly). Blind user takes a photo with a cameraphone and sends it to an MMS number. User then receives a call from a call center where an agent describes the photo.
> I think smarkets is also a possibility if you are located in the EU.

Anywhere except the US or Turkey, due to their anti-gambling laws.

I believe smarkets is still looking for market makers too.

http://smarkets.com/api/documentation/
Nope. I figured it out, and it turned out to be something even more devious.
this might be relevant to your (or our collective) interests- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1645520 (MapRejuice - Distributed Client Side Computing (Node Knockout Entry))
Ask HN: He stole my laptop, and sent me this, what would you do?
My laptop was stolen from the trunk of my car yesterday.

Today, I received this email:

---
So as much as i want to rationalize my actions, I understand buying stolen property is still stealing. I am the one who unfortunately bought your laptop from someone who likely stole it. I will eventually pay for my bad karma.

Berating me for my actions is useless.

I am deleting everything off of the laptop.

Is there anything that you want.

I am offering to back up to 160 gigs to another hard drive. There is only about 240 gigs worth of information.

I see that you have backed up most everything using time machine. If there is anything smaller like 4, 8, or 10 gigs worth I can do that faster to DVDs or flash drives.

I would have to buy another hard drive to get you the 160 gigs. Which i would if you need the info.

Again apologies for not having the integrity to turn down the offer to buy your laptop
----

how did he get my email?
how does he know i backed up to time machine?
what would you do?
This is different. In order to be upgraded via software, the chip has to be able to function at the upgraded specs. So Intel can't take a broken batch and sell them in this type of machine anymore; they have to put the good one in no matter what.

That's what makes it seem arbitrary and annoying. When you buy a low-spec chip, you get it cheap because it could be defective. But when you buy this, it's perfectly functional, just artificially limited. You aren't helping Intel increase their yield and getting some savings for helping them -- you are just being fucked because they feel like fucking you.

I hated Intel for a long time, but then they started making good products and contributing drivers to Linux... but if they keep this sort of thing up, that goodwill is all going to erode and AMD will have to opportunity to get the enthusiast market again. (Their "we'll sue you for using the HDCP crack" is similarly goodwill-eroding, especially because there is nobody they can even sue.)
It's almost exactly like the music industry.

This immediately reminded me of "Fluffers Make Movies" http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3218753399273878236 (SFW video, NSFW dialog (but reasonably mild)).
Instapaper's completely free. The only catch is that Amazon charges you 15 cents for any wireless delivery that isn't a book/periodical you purchased from them. So if you set Instapaper to deliver daily, it works out to a fee of ~$5/mo, ~$60/yr. I just set it to deliver weekly and the cost is negligible.
The real issue seems to be that he tried to create a "family restaurant" operation without the "family" (in this case him and his wife) wanting to work in the business:

My wife Lily and I could work there, full-time, save on the payroll, and gerrymander the rest of the budget to allow for lower sales. Guess what, dear dreamers? The psychological gap between working in a cafe because it's fun and romantic and doing the exact same thing because you have to is enormous

In other words, he had the luxury of choice. And he chose not to.
When I was unemployed, HN was a big deal to me. I don't have time to come here now. Developments about languages, frameworks and such is best received other places. The trivial businesses, which are the stuff of legend around here, and often silly, tribal discussions are not worthy of a person looking for new information.

The worst feature of this and many other communities is the transparent effort of many in the discussions to make compliments at the nebulous 'community.' Some cool people make an effort to engage in some threads (especially about them or their fraudulent board members). However, most of the time, hairs are split in abundance.
Sexy, do you run readability on it first?
it was Thunderbird 3.0.7 on linux