skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The "trivial content" objection to Facebook is selectively applied, IMO. Newsflash: much of the entire Internet is lolcats and porn; many people drive cars to walkable destinations; and antibiotics are over-prescribed. Yet, I'm pretty pumped about the existence of computer networks, internal combustion engines, and antibiotics. You don't judge a technology by its most trivial applications, but by its most meaningful ones.
You should try CoffeeScript.
Well, to cite Wikipedia, "Moral nihilism is the meta-ethical view that nothing is moral or immoral."

The primary opposing viewpoint is moral realism, which holds that statements like "Intentionally killing an innocent person is immoral" are both meaningful and capable of being evaluated as a truth claim.

In general, I believe the ability of a social animal to restrain "baser" instincts would be referred to as social cooperation. For humans, a moral realist would say that while morality is closely related, it also can't be reduced to merely social cooperation.
You know this might be the perfect opportunity to make history. let me explain. The thing that struck me the most about the post was that there was no one thing to blame and there was no one way to fix this. That's the thing.We are looking at the problem from the human frame of reference.

If someone can make a data analysis program that takes ALL of the data generated everyday and crunches it together for every conceivable variable and then uses machine learning to find common cost patterns vs. time and policy (the time and date of execution of policies and their direct impact can thus be judged). Then we might as well have magic in our hands.

This is hard data that no one can argue against (some will still manage...). If we can make something like this might as well be the first time in history that policy has been made using AI as a crutch. I hope that it won't be the last.
LOL. When your "job is rotting your brain" and you don't feel challenged, you are overlooking a challenge. And perhaps an opportunity.

Most brain-rot inducing jobs are characterized by repetition. Depending upon where your job is mired, try doing the following:

* Making libraries / frameworks to speed up tasks
* Making scripts to speed up tasks
* Hooking scripts to forms
* Making forms user-available ("self serve")

At minimum, building these efficiencies while still doing the boring stuff will be a _slight_ challenge. And when you are done you may actually have tools that you can productitize.

At minimum you will have the experience.
Google does both heuristically parse Javascript and execute Javascript, for at least some fraction of their crawl. This is obviously much more expensive than doing HTML parsing, particularly once the Internet largely goes from static HTML to AJAXy magic.
In the Long Run with Jeff Bezos
Ask HN: Have any of you filed "$0" in your Tax return?
I have been working on my startup for the past couple of years and have been drawing no salary and living on personal savings.

I am in the process of filing for my Tax return by oct 15th (the extended deadline). Does this mean I put a big fat "$0" on my tax returns?

I know it sounds obvious, but I find it quite strange to do that.

I used to make quite a bit before I did my startup and I was also married till my last filing where even if I was making no money, my former wife's income would atleast show some income in the tax return.

Do all startup people who live of my personal savings actually file a "$0" in thier tax return?

I know this is not a tax/CPA forum but I am curious about other founders experiences.
Comcast Donates Additional IPv6 Open Source Software
You missed this part:

don't also take the dignity away from people making an actual difference in the world. Leave them with that

Although he cites grand achievements at first, this applies equally to teachers, nurses, or unseen infrastructure-maintainers. I.e. people making an incremental difference.

There's a whole pyramid of unsexy jobs required so that a few of us can have the spare cycles to try trivial things (some of which will end up being non-trivial).

I suspect that what really bothers the author is not startups, per se, but rather all the "Rah, rah, we're changing the world" attitude in the startup community.

Personally, I think you can't separate the two. It's a throw-stuff against the wall and see what sticks system that created a lot of the grand achievements he praises.

If it means I need to listen to a lot of semi-annoying young'ins going on about their retarded projects, then so be it. Some of them will be important.
As long as $5000 is enough for you to survive 3-4 months, go for it. As others pointed out, calculate your burn rate and make sure you won't call it quit after a month. You need enough time to put a MVP out there!

As a side not you will probably lose the money, but the learning experience will be invaluable :) From what I understand sounds like your burning rate should be pretty low. $5k could be enough. The risk seems minimal. You are just out of school, not leaving any kind of high paying job (anyways, you can always find one if you fail). The worst case scenario is losing that 5k.

You can do it!
Google updates its Privacy Policies
The Miracle of microRNA
I may be completely off the mark, but I think that the cost of research may be hidden somewhere in all those huge numbers . US is making breakthroughs all the time in drugs, medical machinery/equipment, IT in medicine, disease discovery & prevention, etc. For example, HPV vaccine came from the US (I know about this, because my daughter will be vaccinated when she reaches teenage period).

Much of the rest of the world is piggybacking on US. That's my opinion. I am from Europe.
http://lifehacker.com/5644249/licorize-turns-your-bookmarks-...

Gives at least a tour of some of the features, and gives you the gist of what it does.
I'm in the same boat as you. I'm a happy Mint user and had never, ever heard of Wesabe.
(Note: IANAL but I am, or have been, the founder or co-founder or director or board member of multiple Delaware-based corps).

If the company is in distress, or a sale is considered inevitable, the main precedent often cited is Revlon:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revlon,_Inc._v._MacAndrews_%26_....

If a company is not in a distressed state (referred to as 'Revlon circumstances') then the directors not only have a responsibility to accept the higher price, but also have to weigh price above all other parameters and have an obligation to shop or auction the deal to find and establish the best market price. This falls under Smith:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Van_Gorkom

Cases where a lower offer is accepted over a higher are very clear cut, most decisions are around having two equal offers, but where a decision is made against weighing up the future value and/or burden of any debt that makes up one of those buyout offers.

ie. if you get two offers of $500M each, but one of those carries a debt burden, you must take that into consideration when making your decision. Also, any offers made to any directors in terms of future employment are a conflict of interest, and those directors or managers must be excused from the negotiation or must make the interest known to the board.

The standard legal advice with Delaware companies is as follows (since most startups are based in Delaware, it is good to know this):

"When it becomes clear that the target corporation will be sold, the board of directors of the target owes a fiduciary duty to the shareholders to obtain the best value reasonably available under the circumstances, and may even have a fiduciary duty to run a fair auction. The board cannot favor one bidder over another when both bidders are offering an adequate price."

from: http://www.hogefenton.com/eblast_3-5-08.html

Other than Smith, there are plenty of cases where shareholders have sued and won after a company is sold and they feel that either the best price wasn't obtained, or that the directors had a conflict of interest (ie. they went on to gain employment with the acquirer at above-market/ridiculous terms - in effect a bribe for acquisition).

If you have raised money, and you get an offer from a company where they will give you a small buyout but will offer you personally stock in their company and a great salary etc, you have to be careful because you may be neglecting your duty (Ron Conway mentioned last year that this was happening a lot with Facebook).

Also related is the talk around the Parakey acquisition (though nobody sued, so no suggestion of any wrong-doing):

http://techcrunch.com/2007/09/25/parakey-did-investors-get-l...
TechSmith Takes Long Road to the Top in Screen Capture and Recording Software
Great analysis, very valuable -- thanks to Marc for taking the time to do it. The points about the Yodlee tradeoff and focusing on the use case that required a lot of work from people are very insightful.

I agree with the others here that Mint's name and design played a huge role in its success. Years ago somebody mentioned Wesabe to me and from the way the name sounded I couldn't find it on a quick web search, I gave up. When I eventually saw the site my reaction was "looks complicated". By contrast Mint was easy to find and looked very easy to use.
I think Govt should pay diagnosis fees and patients will pay for medication.
Interesting. I have lived both in France and in Canada and I find the french health system so much better that I find it hard to believe both countries spend almost the same per capita.
Its also very hard to misspell.
Missing like 2.2k
20k USD and living costs of 400 USD per month. Also, very marketable skills:

Teaching English in China can get you that 400 USD rather quickly. Also, if you can do basic web development, you're pretty marketable (this pays relatively better than English, but English jobs are possibly easier to find than software consulting).

Unlike a lot of people starting a business, I had almost no fear of starving on the streets. When it comes to ensuring that I both have food and own as much of my time as possible, I try to eradicate risk as thoroughly as possible. Having a minimal financial footprint and redundant contingency plans allows me to do that.

Thankfully, these days, I don't need the side-jobs, I mostly just focus on growing my business's profit. When I want something unusual (new monitor, new advertising campaign), I just sleep a little less and pull in the extra money with some software consulting.

You can call it the lazy loading approach to finance.
Nor does he seem to understand the difference design can make. He hints that he understands, but I don't think he really gets just how much of a difference the stunning first impression of Mint made. It's like the difference between meeting your favorite actress, and meeting some b-list reality star like Paris or Snooki.

Per your assertion, I think Nike (greek goddess of victory) is the best brand name of all time, and Apple would be second. But Mint is definitely right up there.
Startup Executive Compensation Scorecard
How does bankruptcy work in Spain? Does such a thing exist?
Yes, and also all credit does go to kroger[1] for the link to the new essay!

-------

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1745379
An alternative to third party cookies for login sites is to do a fast forward redirect through the main site for the login and then back again to the destination.

If done properly the user will barely notice or care and it's certainly less invasive than forcing 3rd party cookies to be used.
I guess you're trying to make a funny. Have an upmod for effort.

What you may not be aware of is how difficult it is to perform certain types of financial transactions without a permanent address. Trading in stocks, for example. Quite often you need to do certain things in person and need to provide identification, which in turn may require a fixed address.

He may have been using the seniors centre as his address, he may have been doing something else.

The key here isn't that he was homeless and used the telephone in the senior's centre, the key is that he was homeless and used the telephone in the senior's centre AND managed an investment portfolio.
If I only test the optimal circumstances for a new thing, then I have done a terrible job at trying to understand the consequences of adopting it.
> I agree with you that the concept of Facebook had boundless potential, but the author has a point in that what it amounts to right now is an echo chamber of inanity. Sadly, I don't think Facebook itself can recover from this.

I don't want to get into Facebook specifics, but I offer this general observation.

If my other half and I want to spend a relaxing evening catching up on general gossip about how our friends are getting on, we invite 20 people over. We get party snacks and plenty of cheap 'n' cheerful drinks.

If we want to spend a rewarding evening learning new things and having deep discussions and thoughtful debate, we invite 2-4 people over. We make a nice dinner and get a good bottle of wine or two.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that even with exactly the same individuals, the way you interact can be very different depending on the situation. Social networking sites of the kind we see today take casual interaction to the extreme, where people are more concerned with broadcasting than actually interacting, and the content is mostly trivial.
I think there may be some truth to this. Even when the developing company is European, they often rely on the American market to fund much of the research.
If you want collective smarts, include women in your group
I had a phone interview with Marc sometime in 2007, I think just after TC40. During the interview they made me aware of Mint.com, so I spent the afternoon playing with Mint & Wesabe.

By the end of the afternoon I had begun using Mint to track all of my finances and had only managed to get Wesabe to recognize 1/3 of my accounts. Wesabe had a fantastic team, but Mint was the clear winner, so I decided not to go forward.
Esty's office space looks sweet, but how do they keep that place clean? Even in normal offices I am always surprised how must dust collects everywhere and that is with cleaners coming in every day... can't imagine anyone ever dusting a giant owl.
'Social Network': Password Is Perfection
"No one, in my view, solved the financial problems of consumers. No one even got close. "

Completely disagree. Mint's easy budgeting tools helped me cut expenses and start an aggressive savings plan. That, plus INGDirect's multiple sub-accounts.
You're wrong. Design is the graphics and user experience taken together. Most companies still have a designer that designs both UI (graphic element style and placement) and UX (dictation of frontend behavior).
Our defense budget is 7% of our GDP, which is the 5th highest rate in the world (according to wiki). I would hardly call that free. Also, there is a shortage of tech talent here and the salaries are quite high. So there are also hidden costs with the military getting people to work for "free".
Coach potatoes on social networks create less content - opportunity marketers
You have to check out this website I used to manage my personal finances, I think you'd love it.

- What's it called

We-...we-seebe? Wasawbe?

- How's that spelled?

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

You have to check out this website I used to manage my personal finances, I think you'd love it.

- What's it called

Mint
> Now, it is true that the Social Security system then holds "assets" in exchange for that cash, namely, government bonds. But this is just accounting fiction.

No, there's no fiction - legally it must be paid back. That's why Social Security debt is included in the gross national debt.
I don't want to make this a huge political debate but i want to address the point that 'X deciding who lives and dies', where X=government. Currently we're just solving for a different value of X.

Certainly people are deciding who lives and dies; life-saving care is denied specifically by insurers, and implicitly by the fact that many don't have any means to pay for care.

That's not an argument for or against single payer or full govt-run healthcare (though i am for that - i just don't have time to get that into the discussion)...
Paperclip Maximizer
The weekly newsletter I put out might help with that - http://www.hackernewsletter.com
About 60% of new drugs come from the US. And there are only a couple of new molecules discovered every year, mostly it's just about repurposing existing drugs because this much cheaper. More money goes to marketing. So, that's not it.
I LOVED the wesabe downloadable data import client. The fact that I didn't have to fork over the login credentials to my financial accounts was a huge win & what kept me away from Mint until wesabe closed. But clearly this was not an issue for most people and hence why the simplicity of the yodlee backed solution ultimately won.

Wesabe did one very interesting thing when they launched which was that the CEO had open office hours when you could call and talk to him. They were one of the first "Web 2.0" companies to do this. I think they stopped this at some point, but I always loved the concept.
It seems that if someone would make something like this work with a few more states then Delaware. They could charge a small amount to use this app. Seems very useful.
I had never heard of Wesabe until reading this article, though I'm not sure how I missed it. My biggest complaint against Mint is specifically why most people flock to it: it's automated and there isn't much you need to do to get existing transactions and analyze them. Maybe it's changed since Intuit bought them, but I signed up for their service two different times and toyed with it for a few hours before canceling on both occasions. To me, true finance management is not only analyzing existing spending, but preparing for future spending.

I want to be able to setup a budget.

I want to be able to setup recurring transactions and future bill payments so when I look at my finances at any given moment, I can see what I have coming due today, tomorrow, in two weeks.

I don't want to rely on my bank to tell me how much cash I have available, because it doesn't know the $1 pending gas charge from yesterday is actually a $45 fill up that hasn't cleared, but I do.

I want to keep track of all aspects of my paycheck so I can estimate my taxes all year long and adjust my withholdings accordingly or save if I'm going to have to pay in.

I'm sure I could go on and on. I realize we're moving towards (or are already in) the era of webapps and people are moving away from desktop apps, but I've yet to find a decent online finance manager that does what MS Money can do. It's a shame they discontinued it, because in my opinion it kicks the crap out of Mint.

I'm not really sure how this relates to the article, I just think it's a shame that Wasabe lost out to Mint because Mint was dumbed down enough that users don't have to do much of anything. Properly manging your finances should most certainly require user interaction to do it properly and it sounds like Wasabe was trying to do just that. Maybe that's why so many people struggle with finances, because they don't take an active enough roll in managing them and I fear something like Mint just aids in that passiveness.

As the Marc says in the article, "Changing people's behavior is really hard. No one in this market succeeded at doing so -- there is no Google nor Amazon of personal finance." It's been a while since I've given it a look, but last I check Mint wasn't even close. If Wasabe was, it's truly a shame they were beat out by Mint catering to and lazy users and enabling them to stay lazy when IMHO, the problem they're allegedly trying to solve requires exactly the opposite.
Good article, but I'm concerned the premises of the article have been skewed by misleading graphs. The initial graph of GDP to medical expenditure is reasonably convincing, the graphs later in the article much less so. I could be wrong about this, but it feels a little like the data selection and curve fitting have been selected to supported the hypothesis rather than the other way around (something that could easily happen accidentally).

On a tangential note - that pie chart he uses in each section is an unintentionally good example of what not to do when displaying data. I have to confess, I don't really understand it.
It's interesting that you mention the HPV vaccine. It's extremely expensive, although that's not entirely based on the research costs.

"Gardasil took more than 20 years to develop, is complex to manufacture, and must be constantly refrigerated, but that’s not why it’s so expensive. Instead, Merck calculated the price based on the money the vaccine will save the entire health-care system—and the CDC approved the price, as it does with other vaccines."

http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jun/hpv
Didn't think about the bond angle. Thanks!
To the best of my knowledge, no. One of the reasons for the ISO date standard being YYYY-MM-DD is that there is no country in which the interpretation of a date given that way is at all ambiguous.

There are countries with DD-MM-YYYY or MM-DD-YYYY, so you really do have to put the year first to avoid ambiguity. However the 79 in 1979 cannot be a month or a day.
Just don't forget to turn in your badge when you leave.

AOL took like $50 out of my last paycheck for mine!
I worked for two startups which ended up acquired by Yahoo. The engineering culture is fantastic. Some of the smartest people I know work there. The rest of the company seems sclerotic and obsessed with turf wars. That's what did it for me. It was difficult to get things done quickly. Every cool & useful project was almost an act of rebellion.

It's galling to see so much latent potential. Don't look at it as "no worse than big corps". The shame is that it's no better.
On CPAN there is a small Perl Lisp interpreter: http://search.cpan.org/dist/perl-lisp/

It seems to have be written for the express purpose of parsing Gnu newsreader 'eld' files! (example here: http://cpansearch.perl.org/src/GAAS/perl-lisp-0.06/newsrc.el...).

Here is a more general Lisp example in the distribution:

(defun sum (a b &optional c)
(write a b c)
(+ a b))

(setq a 100)
(setq b (sum 4 5))
(write (print (list a b)))

(write (ord "a"))
(write (chr ?a))

(write "Yesterday was:" (localtime (- (time) (* 24 60 60))))
(setq pid (perl-eval "$$"))

(setq a 10)
(while (not (zerop a))
(write a)
(setq a (1- a)))

(list "Good bye")
I imagine they'd keep track of your withholding, so the "bill" would be for the difference between what you'd paid already and what you owe. Just like your current tax return.

In the case of a refund, it might even take the form of a check that, if cashed signifies your intention not to file a return.
I don't think it's hidden at all. He says in the Drugs section...

"The problem is that our drugs, on the whole, cost about 50% more. For name brand pharmaceuticals, we pay about 77% more. Why? Some will say that it’s because we’re wealthier and need to subsidize for the rest of the world. But even if we paid more based on our relative wealth, it would come to about a 30% premium, not the 77% we do pay."

So the problem is obvious. The issue is how to fix it. We in the U.S. can either enforce our own price controls which will break the system or we can force U.S. companies to charge more to other countries and take the chance of denying medicine to sick people because foreign governments won't accept the higher prices.

Not an attractive choice no matter how you slice it.
Can anyone please advice a good resource to read on how US health care and health insurance system works? From a foreigner or extraterrestrial perspective, preferably.

I dream of there being the site where I can read on different aspects of life in various countries, such as education, health care, etc. all described from a neutral point of view. But I'm afraid that such thing may not exist yet due to little demand. I mean, how many people are thinking "hmm, which of those 250+ countries should I choose for living?"