skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I read and enjoyed your original post from a purely analytical standpoint. Patio11 is a rather popular guy here and you rightly stated how brilliant his work has been.

I cringed a little bit while reading the latter part of your post, but I still stuck with "never attribute to malice . . .". I've wondered why giving folks the benefit of the doubt wasn't in the In Comments section of the guidelines (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

I'd like to print your response and frame it as an example of how to own up to a mistake. I don't know you, but you sound like a very decent human being and you have my respect for what it's worth.
Grace Hopper interviewed by Letterman [vid]
I am a recruiter representing a few Ruby driven companies in SF. They can handle VISAs for the right people. If you want send me your resume and I can see if we can move fast. I have recruited 20 years and I have never had a company I worked for pull the Visa unless they had a serious layoff. Feel free to reach out to me on linkedin. http://www.linkedin.com/in/markgentry/
I largely agree with dhh’s thesis that “minority investment valuations aren’t real”, and I agree that the lack of liquidity is part of the problem. But I think it’s “liquidity preference” that totally breaks the investor valuation.

As a toy example, imagine a company that could be worth $3, $30, or $300 each with equal probability. The logical valuation of this company is $111. A risk tolerant investor would pay $11.1 for 10% of the company.

Now imagine you have a 3x liquidation preference. If the company liquidates for less than 3 times your investment, then you get it all and the suckers holding common stock get nothing. How much will you pay for 10% of the company in this situation?

Well, if the company exits at $3 or $30 then you’ll get all of it, and if it exits at $300 then you get $30. The total expected value is ($3 + $30 + $30)/3 = $21. That’s almost twice what you’d pay if didn’t have liquidity preference! Even though, with 3x liquidity preference, you’d pay $21 for 10% of the company, $210 is clearly a nonsense valuation for the company as a whole.
This is how industries wind up getting regulated.
Sorry to hear you didn't go with Grails (my framework of choice too). Sounds like the .Net choice was based on his skills, and not yours. The domain-first approach of Grails, especially with greenfield projects, is so tempting that it'd be really hard for me not to choose it for something these days. I have chosen non-Grails tech in the last year, but it's been a tough choice in those cases. :)

How's the project site coming along?
Somehow this reminds me of a scene from Up in the Air in which George Clooney reveals that his dream is to gather ten million miles in order to get "lifetime executive status, meeting the chief pilot Maynard Finch, and getting his name painted on the side of a plane."
If you want to have some fun, try LOLCODE (http://lolcode.com)
Heyzap looking for an iPhone/iOS engineer to lead a new project (YC 09)
Well said. This type of a reaction to making a mistake should be encouraged and emulated, not only on HN but beyond. I think Sebastian is handling this extremely well, and there is a lot to be learned from that.
The Four Finger Method (and the descrambling of Electric Blue)
The biggest thing I still cannot get over with in OS X:

THERE IS NO CUT!!!

If you want to move a file to somewhere else, you have to either copy&paste, or use mouse to drag (which sometimes is really difficult if the two locations are not reachable in one window/screen).
TheLikestream, Digg For Facebook “Likes”
I couldn't agree more; I've gone through the phase of accepting the 'excited' people's input as valid and can testify that you need to qualify your assumptions - derive facts by which to make decisions.

Read more on these topics with Steve Blank (read his The Four Steps to the Epiphany!) and Eric Ries.

http://steveblank.com/
http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/

You won't regret educating yourself based on the experiences of others. No matter what you think, you're not smarter than the market; you need to understand the market, and that means having the humility to prove your assumptions.
Wow..

I assume he's just trolling for pageviews and links, but it makes me wonder if real people actually think like that? I suspect a few do.
Haha, I was contemplating posting this myself to HN, but since I don't have a blog where I could do a writeup and collect some links, I decided not to.

For those that are confused, Sweden does not have electronic voting, and you can vote for anything, not just registered political parties. There's no list of parties where you are supposed to mark one, instead you get an envelope, and put in a ballot paper that contains the name of the party you are voting for. Normally you get a pre-printed one from the party you want to vote for, but you can also take a blank one and write whatever you want on it.

Any ballot with something written on it is a valid vote which has to be counted and becomes part of the official election result. Since a few years back they started publishing these results on the website of the election authority, you can see the 2006 results here: http://www.val.se/val/val2006/slutlig/R/rike/roster.html

The list of votes for registered parties that did not gain any seats are here: http://www.val.se/val/val2006/slutlig/R/rike/ovriga.html

And finally, the list of write-in votes for non-registered parties is here: http://www.val.se/val/val2006/slutlig_ovrigt/handskrivet/R/i...

So given this, it was just a matter of time before someone would use their vote to see if they could do a pen and paper scripting attack. :-)
Thanks, I'll see if I can fix that.
A Melbourne startup is looking for a Passionate Technical Co-founder
Hi all,

We are a Melbourne based IT startup business of 2 founders, and currently working on an interesting web project. We are seeking someone who strongly believes in entrepreneurship, has great technical background (preferably PHP & Javascript), and wanting to make their daily life fulfilling to be part of this new venture.

For those who are somehow interested in this, please drop me a line at 2bhalfmad@gmail.com, and we can have chat or even a meetup to take you through in more details.

Best of luck to all the entrepreneurs out there. :)
Although I agree with jgc that banning is deserved here, I don't think there's any need for it. The community's condemnatory reaction to lionhearted has so far been appropriate, and I think it will be effective in deterring similar bad behavior in the future. If I'm correct about this, it's a better outcome than a ban. Let banning be reserved for those who either don't care about the approval of their peers, or who are too oblivious to adapt to social cues.
'They were born out of Twitter users need'

While I'm sure it was a case of hands writing faster than your brain was thinking, wanted to pull you up on this given how many people do have that opinion. TinyURL is 8+ years old now (I think), certainly older than twitter. Twitter is just the reason that large(r) numbers of non-tech users have become familiar with them.
Once your carrier gets its hands on the phone, it's not gonna be open, no matter how badly Google wants it to be.

Let's give kudos to Google for making it possible for us to get open devices (either directly from Google, or through one of several niche manufacturers (I'm watching Always Innovating and the Open Pandora people here (also, I was a Lisp programmer in a former life))) and leave the blame where it really belongs: The carriers.
I actually think that the gloomy weather makes you stay indoor a lot more to work on startup ideas... I don't think weather is an issue here. In addition, the weather in Seattle is very similar to that of Vancouver.
BC's economy is mainly service-driven. There are just few software companies.
1) get them to show you a big list of pre-sold clients....then discount that by 10x
2) contact a few of these clients and see if they would be hooked on it like crack
3) use 1 and 3 to estimate the value
4) demand control of the price at the end. if the service is a loss leader for your partner, you can make them pay the price. remember that value created does not equate to value captured.
5) create milestones: ie 'you sell $X in Y months OR you give me your client list and I KEEP all rights to the tech and brand'
Erlang. At least syntax wise it will seem exotic given the languages you know.
At that level, especially when selling to the government the competition is lethal. But even on the web when you make a mildly profitable little business you're not immune from snipers looking to take your validation of the market and your research and to produce an outright clone of your offering.

So better be prepared, and remember that nice guys finish last, that doesn't mean that you have to go and be a mafioso, but at the same time it means that if someone lands you a punch you should not offer the other cheek.
For a laugh,

http://lolcode.com/specs/1.2
That opinion is damaging to the community, and should not be allowed.

It amazes me that in this day and age, we still hear stuff like this.

It's not like he wrote "PATIO11 IS TEH SUXORS! FUK IM!!!". He wrote a long, thought out (perhaps not enough; besides the point) blog post and then decided to share that with the community ~ to which the community felt deserved the effort to respond to, one way or another.

Who are you to suggest that opinion is both unwanted and "damaging" to the community? If anything, suggesting that people only be allowed to certain criteria, methods and train of though is what is damaging and should not be allowed.
Just curious, what kind of analysis are you thinking of doing?
Work with your users and do not focus on what your competitors are doing all the time. Take Mint for example, they intentionally ignored the competition and it worked out ok... In terms of what the competitor is doing right, you should be getting that info from your users. One more thing... make sure you are doing one thing extremely well in your product versus many things.
The wire sensor buried in the pavement has been around since the 1960's, and nothing has improved since then.

You don't need to place sensors anymore, a simple camera can do it.
Indeed. I remember first seeing seeing TinyURL's in magazines and newspapers. Saved a bit of space and typing over some of the more unwieldy links. Seemed like a good idea for that, though I was unlikely to trust them online until Twitter all but 'forced' me!
Netflix May Launch Streaming-Only Plan in the U.S.
Still not as exotic as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_%28programming_langu...

Still, Brainfuck is cool in that it's really easy to write compilers for it.
Review my prototype: API Discoverer [do not work under Chrome]
You insert an URL where your JSON is, then we grab automatically all the Results; you have to add parameters manually.
Even iframed, you end up with an ugly "service unavailable" blot of text.
It's a bit more involved than that, nowadays there are many sensors instead of just one to detect a waiting car in front of the light, the speed gets measured as well as the number of vehicles.

As for a 'simple' camera, nothing that you deploy in all weather conditions is ever simple if it is to operate reliably.
Thanks it should now be fixed.
Let this be a lesson to you edw519: you make a joke, and both your heroes attack you! Biff! Bam! Actually, I can't imagine a funnier response.
I helped build a house out of spare wood for a family friend. It was really exciting to see it come together and to think that this wasn't just a random side project, but something that would be lived in and greatly appreciated.
It is temporally circular, not logically circular. It's a pernicious cycle. It has been headed for disaster for a while, but like a lot of economic trends that were (and are) obviously headed for disaster, people tended to think it could go for another ten or twenty years, a horizon that has really shrunk due to the fact that the economy has choked.

If the economy doesn't really pick up in the next year I think we're going to see some very shocking numbers come next fall admission.
I live in a small midwestern town that has recently taken to the idea of roundabouts. At first, I was extremely pleased (having good experiences with them in Paris/French HW systems) but I quickly became discouraged when I realized that 90% of drivers had no idea what they were doing.

I now avoid certain routes through town because I'm afraid of getting in an accident.
You don't submit patches for Codeplex - you submit patches to projects hosted on Codeplex. Some project managers and devs using Codeplex are better than others at reviewing and taking patches and involvement. So what? Most projects on Sourceforge are just plain dead, but everything there is 'open source'.
You might look into using Quickbooks - they have addon payroll options (I've not tried payroll though, sorry). I do like Quickbooks, however. Most accounting firms work well with the data files. Good reporting.
I read that as pure jealously. As am I jealous of this kid's literal million dollar skillset.

The guy who wrote that knows he could never be as good or make as much as Patio. That's why it's strongly worded.

Alas, tone and tongue-in-cheek are not grasped well when there is shock and awe.

Really I can't see why anyone would take it any other way, what with the intense praise he was giving him.
Eventbrite Makes Events More Social By Meshing Deeper With Facebook
Online ticketing startup Eventbrite is amping up the social features of its service by creating deeper hooks with Facebook. When you purchase a ticket through Eventbrite, you can already share that purchase with your Facebook friends. But now Eventbrite will be adding a deeper layer of integration with Facebook to power social event discovery.
Not only do you yell at other people to Finish Shit, you yell at yourself to Finish Shit too. Now that's dedication, and not at all crazy.

http://twitter.com/finishshit/status/25282475677
We are in. We aren't using Twilio yet, but we sure could be convinced. :)
If we are going to move forward into the era of the Real-Time web, we need to be setting examples of how different companies/sites can work together with event-based messaging/notifications.

I wouldn't call the current hook into HN a good example to set, though. It's a specific hack to allow notifo access, rather than a step towards generic collaboration.

Note that I don't have a problem with it - it's pragmatic and useful. But I don't see it as a step forward.
Ask HN: What is the fair valuation (now and 5 years later) of Facebook?
Of course, in your opinion.
Or even a directional microphone, or an infrared sensor, or a microwave radar, etc.
As a motorcyclist, I'm going to disagree completely if the standard technology that is used to detect cars is used. Generally there's some sensor in the road that detects a large metal object above. If you're riding a 400 pound motorcycle, it doesn't trigger.

I've sat at lights for several cycles trying to get a left turn signal, only to be required to run the light (illegally) to get through while traffic built up behind me. Not cool. They need a better way of sensing cars.
>> One of the memes constantly reinforced here at hn is pushing the envelope.

edw519, this is not by any means a personal attack on you and I admire your appreciation for the general value that this place gives you. But I gotta call this one out - sorry.

Reinforced. Really? How is this reinforced? In my experience pushing the envelope is barely tolerated, and then only if done superficially or regarding trivial issues.

For example, as another incarnation (yamada) I countered one of pg's "go forth and conquer, there's no risk" assertions back in I think april/may 07 with a simple post that a variety of macro variables were purposely allowed to develop in such a way by the powers that be that would result in a not-too-distant economic malaise that would be not only much larger than any recession any HN'rs had ever experienced, but also of a fundamentally different nature and so not lending itself to the standard and known (and thus immediately applicable) cures.

I even went out on a limb and said there was a very real possibility that the next 10 years or so for the U.S., once the S#$% hit the fan, may resemble Japan's lost decade (plus) since it fell apart in the 90s.

I put forth some verifiable things that would not take a rocket science intellect to connect into a likely scenario.

I got close to 100 karma points within hours (that being my first ever post) back when karma point accumulation algorithms didn't exist yet, only to watch all my karma magically disappear in tandem with pg issuing one-liner retorts to EACH and EVERY single comment I had made on any topic whatsoever on any day on any subject. They all disappeared.

Pushing the envelope? Seriously?

Seems obvious now, in retrospect.

But keep in mind I put this all out there in spring of 2007 before anyone here even heard of mortgage backed securities or credit default swaps or what have you.

I'd say that was pushing the envelope back in 07. You know, ahead of it actually happening.

What was reinforced for me? Nothing - my account was deleted. All because I held conflicting (and eventually to be proven correct) economic views of the near future.

Oh ... btw ... I won't name names but to the two gentlemen who referred to me as a "paranoid lunatic with baseless reasoning" and ... let's see ... what was it, a "quasi-logical conspiracy bot" ... how's the economy doing these days? Not so good? The government/industry rallying around to fix it? Ha! Told you so! Nya nya nya nya nya nya! Epic nya nya for me! Global, internationally-spanning nya nya for me! Worth more than all the karma points on HN combined!
3 Top Podcasts For Entrepreneurs (and Why)
Testing Rails against a running Redis instance (+ w/ Hydra)
His $1 trade was in jest. The point is, both are very small numbers compared to 100%, or even 1%.
It's sad to see that according to the comments in the article, quite a few people think that way.

The People to blame are the carrier (and perhaps the manufacturer).
Trefis thinks the stock is worth 361 [1][3], market price is 288 [2], the article says it reached 292, Trefis community average is at 410 [1].

There are 913.56M shares outstanding. Putting it's valuation at 263B. [2]

Which is around Microsoft+Adobe+Nokia or Intel+Google or IBM+HP

I´d short it if i knew how, i love mac, but this is just unsustainable.

Sources:
[1] https://www.trefis.com/company?ovd_urlid=26389&hm=AAPL.t...
[2] http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:AAPL
[3] All figures are US Dollars except when specified.
A dollar per user, is that per month?
Those two are at the top of my list for sure. Haskell because I believe I can learn more from it than any other single language, and Clojure because after I've been enlightened I will want to sit down and build something quickly.
A side-question: Are there any Haskell-oriented groups of people in the Bay Area? I'm increasingly convinced that I'm going to need help if I'm going to teach myself Haskell.

BTW, for the others following along: I've found Haskell to be hands down the most mind-bending of the functional languages. Even with a background in Lisp (actually Scheme) and ML, I still struggle to write non-trivial programs in Haskell. I say this as someone who learned Tcl on the job and gave a presentation on how to program in Tcl just a few months later.
Seriously, and just about every firmware upgrade guide tells you to back up your existing ROM.

http://wiki.cyanogenmod.com/index.php?title=Howto:_Nandroid_...
Fortifying Macros
"There's no demand for that sort of thing here."

Sir, with all due respect, kindly speak for yourself.

I find your post offensive to good sense, pragmatism, and sensibility.

If, and when a person chooses to share their lives with the entire world, they must then also live we the consequences of that sharing, good or bad.

Patio11 has done exactly this - he has quite literally given a piece of himself to the world and for that he has both been praised and psychoanalyzed. He is by all accounts an adult, and I am sure he is aware of the nature of this beast.

I enjoyed lionhearted's analysis, if only as an intellectual exercise. Is that not why this damn site exists? For the stimulation of intellectual curiosity? If this kind of post is not acceptable here, then by all reasonable measures 95% off all front page articles ever, do/did not belong here.

Where is this melodramatic over-reaction when the myriad of critical PG, Zuckerburg, Gates, Jobs, Hansen, Arrington, and Calcanis posts hit the front page? Why haven't the writers of those blog post been similarly singled out? Your needless "defense" of patio11 is more an affront to him then the post of which you disagree! If you're going to engage in high-school melodrama, at least be consistent about its application.

"Let's keep HN sacred."

HN isn't sacred for goodness-sakes. It is a place for intellectual discussion; the subject of which can be anything or anyone. Remove the 'sanctimonious' from your thinking - please.
So many times! With really great movies, they get better every time I watch them. It's A Wonderful Life, The Third Man, Casablanca, and The Godfather, to name a few. Of course I want to see them again. They may not change, but I see new things and understand them more completely every time I watch them. Like all great art, good movies deserve multiple viewings. I love rereading good books for the same reason. I can't imagine only looking at a statue like the Laocoön just once, why would I feel different about a film?
I couldn't wait for JSONP, so I whipped up a simple wrapper proxy (couldn't believe this didn't exist already).

http://jsonpify.appspot.com/?url=http://api.ihackernews.com/...
This is a great idea, and I've been thinking of something similar. Some people, including me, work better when there's someone waiting for the work with some deadline. This works out badly if you're working on your own thing, but people like this can be very productive under a good "boss".

So my idea was a web app where people could sign up to be "bosses", and you'd have some karma system to figure out who the good bosses are, matching them up to the "employees" who sign up to get bossed around to do the tasks they've set for themselves. Now, you'd have to put in measures to make sure bosses don't get abusive (make it part of the karma system I guess), ways to match up people with their boss, etc. But it seems like a neat idea that might just work. I just don't know if you could find enough people who like being a good boss (or at least like getting the karma points associated with good bossing), as well as enough people who'd sign up to be bossed around.
An epic beard: http://www.flickr.com/photos/teich/4828396989/
Twilio Fund: $250,000 for Twilio Powered Startups
Ask HN: I want to create a web framework
I want to create a web framework on top of node.js.

Where should I start? What should I read? Who should I follow? What should I learn?
OK. Do hand written names count in Sweden? That's interesting.

(I know that in Germany, every ballot that has anything but one or two Xs on it, is discarded as invalid.)
In my opinion it is worth what people will pay for it when more then 5% is floated on the open market.
Strategy interns and intern strategy