skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's neat. What I'd worry about is boot-up time. I let people compile and test their program with an AJAX button in the middle of taking a test. It's already 3-4 seconds before they get the result back, more delay would hurt.

With tasks queuing up as they already are, I might not be able to keep a fresh VM pre-warmed every time, either.

edit: The other factor is of course the prospective cost of a brand new configuration. Unless I find I can't prevent the current config from being breached and ephemeral VMs will fix it.
Conway didn't say that he's not interested in making lots of money. Sounded to me like he was just pointing out that making money is not his primary motivation for investing. Now, I don't know him at all, so I can't vouch for whether he's being honest or not. However, I'd like to point out that there are plenty of free-market-loving capitalists in this country (present company included) who do the things they do with "making lots of money" quite a ways down on their priority lists. In fact, many of us would be perfectly content with just loving what we do, making enough to pay the bills, support our families, and have a little bit left over to do some fun and meaningful things with.
AngelList has about as much in common with AngelGate as it does the Hells Angels.

AngelList is the single most democratizing, pro-competitive thing that has happened to tech startup investing in a long time.

(Disclaimer: i'm one of the angels on the list)
The overblown crisis in American education
Memcached is not run (or priced by) Heroku. That is an addon provided by a 3rd party (http://www.northscale.com/).

In addition, there is absolutely nothing stopping you from running your own, separate memcached server and pointing your Heroku app there. If you host it on EC2, then you should have very low latency to Heroku.

Heroku is obviously not perfect, but this particular criticism is not valid. That said, you can point this criticism at Northscale.
At Scribd we get about one of these per day now. Almost everyone has fallen for it once. As scam emails go, it is very clever, and routinely fools tech-savvy people who would never go for a 419 scam. Good of Marco to point it out.
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2159-all-the-wrong-reasons-fo...
Pretty damned mild, really. "You guys are greedy and I disagree with you" != "you guys are breaking the law."
A sort of vague way to do the green wave, but okay I guess. But -- and I say this in all seriousness -- one of my PhD graduate students had a far more interesting and elegant technique five years ago.

In short: each car has a piggy bank. As you're sitting at a red traffic light, it dispenses tokens into your piggy bank. When you go through a green traffic light you have to give some tokens back. Here's the catch: when deciding who to give the green to, a traffic light awards the green light to the compatible set of lanes which have cars with the most total tokens. [Also: tokens expire. And emergency vehicles can be given infinite tokens].

Thus if you've been waiting at a zillion reds, you'll accumulate enough tokens to force your way through green lights later on. The idea is to spread the pain.

http://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/papers/aamas06-traffic.pdf
This guy is assuming he's doing a better job of finding people who would be interested in his product on Facebook than he could via Google. He's probably wrong. Search queries are a better metric for determining intent than demographics are.
Thanks for the feedback! Feel free to fork and try things out. I think you'll find that the project is quite small and manageable and each command is pretty self contained. We would love to hear about alternate interaction models.

One exciting possibility is nREPL, http://github.com/cemerick/nREPL. Since WebKit now supports WebSockets I have a feeling we could add many interesting behaviors into the Bundle w/o descending into Objective-C.
PayPal is _ok_ but I don't feel like they're really pushing the innovation envelope (and haven't for a long time.)

You might consider Recurly http://recurly.com/ as an alternative.
Doesn't sound like it. The key would probably be regenerated from the password and stored in localStorage again.
I'm in the US, so no problems there. I upvoted you for other people who might be looking into using paypal and are outside the US. That would be really frustrating.
Calling TechCrunch's reporting a "bullshit superangel conspiracy theory" is, if nothing else, a prime example of defensiveness.
This might be naive, but a monthly subscription model might work for facebook. Then you'd have no more ads, no more privacy snafus--the goals of the company would be aligned with the goals of the users because the users would be customers. It's simple. Would it tick off some users? Sure, but that hasn't stopped facebook in the past.

I'd pay $10/month for a facebook that cares about me as a customer. Right now I don't use it because facebook's goals aren't aligned with mine, even though it's a valuable service.

But $10/month per user probably wouldn't be enough revenue to match facebook's high valuation.
It's great that we're using iPads and technology to make textbooks interactive (and cheaper!), but shiny toys cannot fix a deeply broken system. The "boring" part of learning is always going to be there. You are always going to lose passion after a few weeks. But this is when you show your real passion, passion that is based on something deeper than the pre-semester high we all get.
I'd really like to see a breakdown of the structure of Japanese government debt. Since it is almost entirely owed to the Japanese people, what form is that in? Bonds? Does the figure include the balance of people's normal postal-savings accounts? Looking up the figures, the total government debt is roughly equal to the total national savings, so am I right in reading that the government has simply burned the entire nation's savings on building roads and bridges? Banzai! At least they got a spiffy looking country out of the deal. Zero the books and kick out the bureaucrats, and pray that Nintendo keeps selling Wiis.
Zuckerberg saying "[fragmentation is] kind of a disaster right now" in app platforms? I guess Facebook will be adopting OpenSocial?
What does an 82MHz band really mean? I understand that devices are confined to communicate within the frequencies of 2.4GHz +/- 41MHz (come to think of it, that's ridiculously narrow... a margin of .00000034%), but is band related to actual bps bandwidth? If so, how? And why is the available band so narrow?
I just made a similar step. My first app is yet to be approved (it got rejected because I accidentally covered the Google Logo in the Google Maps API), but my opportunities for contracting work have skyrocketed (namely, I went from no work to more than I can handle alone). It's a bubble for sure, but as a poor student, I'm ok with some supplementary income. Especially since professional iOS devs charge so much, it's creating a nice niche for college students willing to work for less than $150/hour.
So, friendliness and trust should also be contagious, as the proverbial smile.

Co-operating with someone to achieve something worthwhile - whether productively, as in work; or pleasantly, as in play - is a good building block.
Ask HN: Favourite books?
I am more specifically looking for business/entrepreneurial books, but marketing, blogging and general tech books are also of interest. What are your favourites?

(I have recently read Super Freakanomics, Purple Cow [again], Theo Paphitis' (British entrepreneur) autobiography, Duncan Banatyne's (another British entrepreneur) autobiography also.

(Hope this is a valid question allowed here. I know we're all enthused with startups and such.)

Thanks in advance. :)
No first-hand experience with these guys, but I've heard good things: http://chargify.com. It's free until the 50 customer mark, although you'll still have to mess with a merchant account.
I'm not sure if this answers your question, but any unlicensed communicate device has limitations on the amount of power it's allowed to radiate. Generally, that's the limiting factor in how far-reaching the signal is. Of course, you could transmit in a very narrow angle using antennas and get quick respectable distances, but then you lose omnidirection.
Pro JavaScript Techniques (Apress, 2006)
What do you do when you get stuck?
when you are working on a problem by yourself and get stuck... what do you do? at work, i ask another programmer, but i'm working at home on a side project... all i know to do is google and put question on stack overflow. any ideas?
About how long does it take to setup a merchant account at a reputable place? I assume they take a 3% cut or so?

Would you have any recommendations for merchant accounts, or are they all pretty much the same?
Inside Russia's Nuclear-powered Typhoon-class Submarine
This documentary shows life of the Russian sailors on the biggest submarine in the world.
In German with crappy English subtitles. Still it is worth seeing.
2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOV8FGpjX4Q
3:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvMmmYMOrn4
4:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kI4vgq6YcU
5:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7r4OENexX8
I get these on behalf of my clients all the time. Don't know of anyone who's fallen for it - if clients get it, they tend to ask me first before dealing with it.

It's the internet. It's always a scam. (TM)
I was at a Seth Godin seminar the other day and what I got out of it was that success will come to those that CARE. Reading this post, you can tell he cares. I am 2000 miles outside the valley but I am starting to see who cares and who doesn't.

Care about the little guy, care about the entrepreneur, care about making a difference and changing the world. Everyone only gets one go, if yours is going pretty well already then help someone else.
That beard is almost as epic as Katie Holmes.
There's a thing called F# that you should read more about.
I'm going to pistol whip the next person that says "AngelGate"

(Worth it.)
When I worked in Germany some coworkers were trying to figure out the English word for betriebshof (bus depot) by using Altavista's Babelfish, which claimed it was "yardyard yard".
It is easy for you to make ridiculous accusations or observations, because you don't have to come back here tomorrow and say 'oh, I was wrong'.

Since I started following this story I have seen all manner of ridiculous commentary, regardless of the evidence presented. Each new day disproves almost every comment made from the previous day.

Your accusation is cheap and is not held to the same standards that you expect from the same blogs and people that you criticize.
I NEVER understood, and still don't understand, why are people so attracted to airline loyalty programs? Are the benefits this important? It seems to me the average frequent flyer can reduce his costs by ~10-20%. This is not much.
It didn't seem so at first, but I think there is something insightful about Alex's and your characterisations of these cities (disclosure: I currently live in Cambridge, MA).
http://groups.google.com/group/bahaskell/topics
"... he world's most prolific angel investor apparently doesn't know how to spell "entrepreneur" ..."

There is another (sneaky) explanation.

Ron simply sent out many of these emails to different people with another word with incorrect spelling. This allows you to identify exactly who leaks the message. This is an old "intelligence" trick used to identify the source of information leaks.
It would have been better.

If each sentence was not.

Its own paragraph.
and as a side note... amazon aws web support is totally worthless. all they do is give you the most general link possible about a topic.
Small stuck, go for a walk or suchlike. You'll come back with 2 or 3 new ideas.

Really tricky ones - write off a day to 'troubleshooting' and try out some radically different ideas including ones you may have rejected earlier, hacking or scribbling down the bare minimum to see if it makes sense. Often they won't, but every now and again your struggles will have led you in the meantime to some new insight which allows you to escape the 'local minimum'.

Still no luck? Decompose the problem into smaller pieces and put them under the microscope one at a time.
Local bank, pay monthly in cash (China is a cash economy).
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You'd have to learn a little Scala for the configuration language, but not much. It should work otherwise although I'm not sure if it can do everything Maven can.
Thanks dude, I will try to use that as inspiration. But I will try to tough it out for one year, and then I guess re-evaluate my cards then...
Is this a scam or do you actually get the domain names? If you get what they are selling you, then it's just unsolicited advertising, which is not really a scam.
$100K sounds like a lot for an app. With equity on top of that? I'd stay away.

Can you build a prototype of it? Even in Excel or something to get the general logic worked out?
Start with website payments pro by paypal. It's the easiest to get setup and approved for and has reasonable rates. Later, once you have more paying customers, you can switch if you really think it will make a difference. And using something like Chargify or Spreedly allows you to change your merchant account without affecting the recurring billing. Paypal isn't always perfect and they certainly screw up, but for the handful of issues you hear about, there are millions of transactions that work out just fine.
Can you tell us what your service is ?
Hmm, I see, thanks...
I didn't realize Katie Holmes was all that epic...
It is very difficult to be what Ron Conway is. Respect. He is not preaching but living an example & telling others that it can be done. The problem is that this mail was meant only for super angels to possibly introspect and be influenced. Not to be beaten around in public forums embarrassing the investors. Sometimes confessions in private work better as a fix. It is hard in public.

If Arrington had any sense he would have kept quiet and not divert attention to a debacle through TC at the cost of start-up community.
Health Term Papers—Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis is a common health term paper assignment. Knowing how to write health term papers on tuberculosis, will provide you the ability to obtain a good grade for it. As there are numerous methods in which to approach the term paper, you will be able to write a successful one.
The fact that they are claiming that a fictitious someone else is trying to buy the names in order to convince you to act quickly is what makes it a scam.
I know the initial post was tongue in cheek, but Google Translate seems to be worse than 1999-2000 era Babelfish at times. I often (try to) use it to double check my German before sending off an email and it inevitably fails dramatically and I have to instead check individual words on a decent site like dict.leo.org. It seems weird that a small site like that obliterates Google for word accuracy.
JC said he was going to talk about it on This Week in Startups, even discussing it in the intro - but then said nothing. I scanned the transcript and only found the intro bit, there might be something vague elsewhere, but I don't see it.

"Additionally we’ll be talking about Michael Arrington’s ‘AngelGate’, fact or fiction. And we’re going to tell you how you can come to The Launch Conference, that’s my version of TechCrunch 50, on February 23-24, 2011. All this and more on today’s This Week In Startups."

http://thisweekin.com/thisweekin-startups/this-week-in-start...
In scrambling to get ahead, IE9 losing some of the things that made IE good
PayPal definitely is the easiest way to start–and you will want to move up to something better. We did it for the first few years. We never really had any horror stories, but you need to think about how you'll handle the transition.

If you don't want PayPal, I wrote up some details about why I recently did for a new venture (and some other options). Here:

http://callmeed.posterous.com/choosing-a-cmbb-stack-for-my-s...

I like Chargify and use them at our main company ... but they don't support BrainTree's newest version and I don't really like the other merchants they recommend.
taking a break is definitely a good idea... what do you mean by local minimum?
Get Funny Videos Online For Free
TinkrRoulette is a game of roulettle where every spin of the roulette gives the visitor entertainment from 4 random funny videos.
Pictures? Flickr? Youtube... this seems something to be seen...
Conway helps entrepreneurs he is not invested in as much as he helps those he is invested in. You may not know the guy, but those who do will tell you that is a very genuine sentiment.
You make it sound like pop is the only alternative to rap. I happen to like some of both (along with a lot of other styles of music), but am not interested in the rants of people who are acting like jerks from either musical style.

Dave McClure is free to write with the tone of a jerk all he wants. I don't know anything about him other than the post in question, but regardless of whether that's just his "style", I certainly wouldn't want to do business of any serious kind with him if it could possibly be avoided.
We're using first data for the merchant account for http://inboxseo.com.

It generally takes about 30 days to set up an account with a merchant. you can negotiate with many merchant banks regarding the rate. there isn't one that i know of that's super 'startup friendly', but it's not really that important.

We use http://spreedly.com for recurring billing which is very similar to chargify.

The point of these type of 'middle men' is that they a) keep the CC data and keep you from having to deal with the risks and security concerns of doing so yourself, b) make dealing with recurring billing easier; ie we don't have any 'cron jobs' that run credit card batches every night; c) deal with all the subtleties of prorating the user for upgrading or downgrading a plan mid-month; offering free first month, etc.
You may need to spell out what you're trying to say. Why should one expect the spending per student to decrease solely (or even primarily) as subsidies decrease? Aren't tuition and enrollment far more important?
I just did this about a month ago. I'm pretty sure the timeframe outlined in Mike Davidson's post (http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2005/03/how-to-sn...) was right on. So, 75 days.

If it's helpful, I didn't use any name dropping service. I just waited until the right day, kept checking the whois service (you probably know this, but from the command line, just type in "whois nameyouwant.com"), and then bid on it as soon as I could. It worked out well, and didn't cost anything.
On the other hand, there are tons of game companies in Vancouver ranging from online game, MMORPG, PS3, NintendoDS, to online gambling.

There's MS here but they are here to act as a buffer for their engineers pending H1-B.

Some hardware companies Broadcom, PMC-Sierra, Sierra Wireless.

There are IBM centers in Vancouver and Vancouver Island, but they do largely government projects (consulting) instead of R&D like the ones in Markham area.

Speaking about Google, they seem to acquire a handful startups in the Montreal to Ontario areas.
goto bed, let dream to help me out.
Digg Redesigns, Loses More Than A Quarter of Audience
rework is good.
I find it helpful to work out some very specific test cases, trivial examples, or counter-examples.
Happy to get my doubts answered :) And looking forward to use Angel List some day in the future.
What kind of self-respecting conspiracy that aims to subvert the startup world with collusion among major players discuss their doings over twitter? Someone please buy these guys a copy of Cryptonomicon.
OK, this is much more than just an app. It is capturing a lot of data at one level, then there is the 'web level' where the public interacts with it. Lot of opportunity for revenue at the public level immediately (targeted ads). Vendors will be pushing 'specials' down to the first level when they see the apps getting some traction.. .
I'm in Australia too, although I don't accept recurring payments myself. However, I do make a recurring payment to a New Zealand based company. And by logging into the PayPal Australia website I see an Australian freecall (i.e. 1800) number that I can contact to help set up recurring billing. So it seems things may have changed.

That said, it would be best for people to check more thoroughly first, to avoid any wasted effort!
$ in C++ identifiers is a nonstandard extension that gcc allows on some platforms - cool (and not portable).
via a comment on TC by "Hhhmmm":

This email reeks of someone trying to steer clear of trouble and keep their name clean.

It also reads more like a public blog post, not a private email.

I wouldn't be surprised if Conway tipped TC himself.

Am I right in thinking Conway attended two meetings? If he disagreed so strongly with what was being discussed, why return for the 2nd?
upvoted in shame that I know what a sec 2257 is
Sounds like you are going to get screwed if you go with the dev group. Especially since you will be talking to investors to which they will be introducing you.

Keep pounding the streets to find your technical co-founder. Go to meetups and other events. It's just like dating.
Poor kid on the block fleeced by elderly
Advanced Camera System Revealed in Apple Patent Application
I'd be afraid of the answer if I asked an actual junior high school teacher which side of "average" that writing style would actually land him on in terms of a school essay.
As most people have said, PayPal is incredibly easy to get started. I am still using their website payment standard which involves no coding to get started taking payments.

You'll need code later for doing IPN and customizing and encrypting the buttons. But it is definitely the lowest barrier to entry. It is also probably the cheapest option, at least when starting out.

I added Recurly for credit card payment for flexibility and credibility. The costs are much higher per paying user than PayPal. Each credit card authorization costs about 30cents, and if a customer input bad credit card info and you have dunning on, it can cost more than a dollar to have a nonpaying customer.
I used to think that if there are no options but to go to work when it rains/gloomy.

But look at the flip side, for a city that is well-known for 10 months of gloominess could be easily one of the reasons why people are not coming here or trying to leave. This minimize the talent pool however you read the situation.

Seattle, while having similar weather, has the advantage of being a "US" states. USA as a brand is huge. Given Vancouver vs Seattle, people would choose the latter quicker than the former. Hence there are more people in Seattle compare to Vancouver.

BC's economy is mainly service-driven because what else can they do with the lack of demand?
A text file. Well, a bunch of them. Lets me edit/append to them quickly, from almost anywhere on my system.
Own both that and their first. Totally agree with you. Great book.
Angelgate is missing the point. What about the entrepreneurs?
Now that Silicon Valley is on fire with accusations, and Arrington is getting deserved accolades for blowing the doors wide open in the Angelgate story, there is clearly a missing piece that isn't getting any coverage.

What about the entrepreneurs?

I know of a seed-stage startup that literally just launched and has funding interest from people on both sides of this firestorm. While the world reads the opinions of super angels on every blog that covers tech, where is the coverage on the impact on entrepreneurs who are raising money... say the fresh batch of just-launched YC startups? This needs to end so we can all get back to building companies.

Maybe Hitler knows the answer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlZOfHCpFFs