skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Do you Use Any Coaching Service? 
Hello fellow HN'ers. Solo founder and consultant here.

Just curious if any of you solo founders or consultants incorporate some type of coaching into your daily routine. Perhaps a check in service of some sort. If not, why not, and would such a service help motivate you and alleviate some of the pain associated with being isolated all the time? I realize that some of you actually prefer being on your own, so this is more focused on the HN'ers who are energized to a certain degree by interaction and collaboration with others.
Anything with dynamic scoping belongs squarely in the ancient category. We're about a decade overdue for replacing Elisp with Scheme.
I've been to NYTM, and the booing for the "money" question seems to be all in good fun. More like an inside joke than a jeer. As andrewjshults said, it seems less about ignoring the the viability of the presenter's business and more about keeping the technology and novel aspects of the product front and center.
In addition to technical competence I also look for a high level of intelligence and commitment in people, and personality wise, people that I can work well with and that can work well with me as well as work well with the team.

In the article it said, "It’s also possible for an executive to be highly effective and profoundly influential while being totally despised. The latter is far better."

With me, this type of person would never make the final cut for two main reasons. 1. My concerns about team productivity and unnecessary turnover (most people vote with their feet when working for someone like this). 2. I believe that with a little extra effort I can find people who can do just as good of a job (or better) who will not be despised, making it a lot easier to attract A-Level talent to the company.

People talk, twitter, and post online about things like this. Word gets around. How many A-Level top performers would choose this type of atmosphere when there are better alternatives. Why put in a game room and other perks and then hire someone who the team will despise. That amounts to shooting yourself in the foot.
Because I find Kachingle to be a pretty interesting idea, I'd like to offer an open suggestion to their staff: They REALLY need to design more buttons to put on your blog. They have three options and none of them actually fit easily on my blog. Which makes it hard to try out their idea.

They should have a Feedburner-sized image, a Facebook like-button-sized image and a large, think, more horizontal shape (think 960x30). Since they don't have any of these, I can't put them on my blog without redesigning it slightly. It's a shame, too, because I think their idea is pretty cool.

In regards to the Kachingle vs. NYT paywall thing, I think it's an intriguing stunt. Who knows if it'll actually work, but I think as a promotion tool, you can't beat disruption.
I have a base page jotted @ AppsToWin ( http://www.appstowin.com ). Didn't do much advancement during the week. Friday & Saturday should have more productive sessions to complete some of the basic functionality.
The article (published in 2005) says that Sidney Frank's company "can’t launch a new brand of vodka or gin for the next four years." According to Wikipedia, he sold the manufacturing rights to Bacardi in 2004. His noncompete has expired - I wonder what he's working on now?

Edit: Guess he's not up to anything. Wikipedia: "Before his death on January 10, 2006 at the age of 86 ..."
SSL is nice, but I want to assign an elastic IP to my ELB (or just an A record) so I can get around the CNAME-only problem.
I came across an interesting article "Can malt whisky be discriminated from blended whisky? The proof. A modification of Sir Ronald Fisher's hypothetical tea tasting experiment."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1550199/ via a blog post over at http://keepyourspiritsup-faune.blogspot.com/2008/12/grey-goo...

Basically, its all about creating a perception of value.
Just go back to what you learned developing PC software instead of web software. It might run on a core2 dell, or a slow eeepc, or an i7 lenovo. You might sell it direct, or at best buy, or at Amazon.

The diverse PC industry has done just fine against homogenous computing platforms and appliances. You'll be fine too.
I remember the page99 video submission here, I was impressed and the name stuck. How did you go about making those videos, and which one did you end up picking? I loved the second one, by the way :)

I'm going to drop you a line via e-mail, because I'm going to do an overhaul of http://www.dashler.com/toolbar , and could certainly use some advice if you have a few minutes to spare. At the moment, I'm almost embarrassed by it.

Best of luck with page99, I have a couple of writer friends that might like to check it out if there's a private beta available.
Years and years later and they are finally able to (very slightly) beat psycho. Sigh.
I answered this poll from an Android phone
I'm in the Android business and have submitted apps to multiple markets. What a pain! It's not like this stuff can be reasonably automated. It does not scale to make developers submit multiple places, or to have users search multiple places.

The Android Market doesn't even have a real web presence... there's not even bubble gum and rubber bands holding these markets together. It's all disjoint and hurting progress.

We're hoping the Amazon Marketplace fixes this crap.
Livescribe pens now send notes directly to Evernote
It is not true that people who get payday loans have no other place to get money. What they don't have is a place to get money as conveniently as a payday loan vendor, a fact which the vendors exploit to extract the maximum possible return from their portfolio of lenders.
Why not post your startup? When you say "social graph," I'm intrigued.
How they tried to fool tryerlang.org
He's got a really important point here: Lack of focus / effort is going to be your downfall if you're weak. Assuming you're a competent programmer, there's no shortage of clients willing to hire you as a contractor if you need the extra cash to pay the bills. When I went full-time, I loved it immediately and I know it was the best possible thing for me but I consistently have to work on my effort and concentration to keep producing and being able to work on my projects. (I work on my own projects/apps & design/front-end to pay the bills.)
Different vodkas do taste different, notwithstanding the official standard, and typically the premium ones tend to be better. I have tried blind taste tests. Neutral or not, there are still trace amounts of all sorts of compounds after distillation. Cheap vodkas seem harsh and may have an aftertaste. Premium vodkas are generally smoother in character. I find potato vodkas in particular to have more of a sweet and creamy flavor profile.
Ask HN: Rejecting an accepted job offer. Is it ethical?
I recently accepted an offer from Y! and given the current turnaround of events, I am having second thoughts. Given my legal status I cannot afford to be in unstable position. What's the best thing to do in this position?
What about the Android phones [1] that use Bing, instead of Google? I'm quite confused as to what the Google Mobile Strategy is right now. I wonder if they pay any less to be the default search option on a Android Phone than they do on an iPhone.

[1] http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/09/07/buchanan-bing
I work in the (junk) bond markets. There's a clear distinction between Yield-to-Call paper (which is priced so that different bonds are priced based on the yields they offer) and paper that trades on a 'price basis' (i.e. recovery rates in default are a very major consideration).

For the 'price based' bonds, the APR (or IRR) is a nonsense measure : because it is only considering the best outcome (payback at maturity). Most people don't understand that the high IRRs exist partly because people are bundling the price-effect of the downside case into the single 'yield' number of the best case.

I don't want to defend payday loans really - just point out that Treasury Bonds and (say) Lehman bonds are two very different animals.
Cool ....
Agreed. The current funnel is hard to read in the summary page
When I saw it I thought that was the slum he was demolishing to make his house.

It looks like a building that is so dilapidated the walls are crumbling and fell off.

Maybe it's better in person?

It also looks like a Jenga game in progress.
I thought that too. That seems suspect considering that their actions seem to be courting a lawsuit.
http://kill-or-cure.heroku.com/

Not to rain on the parade, but how was the ancient Greeks' diet more cancerous than the Egyptians?
It's $11 more than Hollywood usually makes from pirates.
The myths about viruses in Unix/Linux
You are conflating two questions:

1) Is it moral?
2) What's the best for me?

It seems like your legal status is a big incentive to take the Y! job, so that should encourage you to follow through.

But... if that's not an issue, it might be a little unethical, but you know what... screw Yahoo. You're just a guy, they are a billion dollar corp. Do what's right for you.
Small Business Web Service: Digitize and Organize Your Paper Documents
Is there any way I can patent the process of patent trolling?
This seems like the potential downsides are almost as bad as the potential wins.

The obvious problem with our system is that the party with the deepest pockets can drag a case out until the opposing party cries uncle and gives up.

There's a simple solution that seems fair; both sides pay into a pool for legal representation and the pool is divided equally. So if Megacorp wants to sue Joe's Startup, Joe can afford the same representation that Megacorp can.

I'm sure there are downsides to that system that I'm not thinking about, but it seems like it would be pretty fair.
wow. this is a real sad story :( Looks like she got lied into to the whole Feminism lie of "you gotta get a career" and ended up getting an abortion. Then, she did it again.
Even better: put Google Calendar on the right of every email. (Maybe make a tabbed pane where you can sort through phone numbers and maps.) I'd use the calendar feature like no other.
Ok, I've got to ask. $15K for one text? Percentage? It's THREE orders of magnitude more other than other general text writing. How can this be justified? (Kind of looks like daylight robbery to me)
I've been using mixpanel's platform for a couple weeks now and have been super pleased with it overall. Being able to deliver stats to my end users has been a big success.
Ask HN: Learning phone development - iPhone or Windows 7 Phone?
I've put it off for far too long and I've decided I want to learn how to make phone apps. Now, the question is: should I learn for windows phone or iphone?

I'm interested in your thoughts on (a) what's easier/quicker to learn, (b) which will be more useful in the future, (c) which will offer a greater chance for earning income, and (d) whatever you thin is good advice...
So people check in "at the Bay Bridge" when they're just looking at it from a mile away?

As an East Bay resident I am offended.
The problem with abolishing patents is that while it might make it easier for companies, it would make it absolutely impossible for small-time, independent inventors to advance human knowledge. What incentive is there for a couple guys to build a time machine in their garage when, as soon as they try to mass produce their invention, any number of larger companies better equipped to manufacture things at scale will just make their invention and sell it for less?

It's much, much more complicated than that.

Some large companies are bureaucracy with poor incentive structures. So innovative tech passes by them. Their size also slow them down a lot even when they want to adopt the new tech. They cannot focus as intensively as a small corporation can.

Beside, not everybody will necessary see the usefulness of inventions. That where entrepreneurs come in. They risk their money, invent better marketing techniques, make it cheap and efficient, and so on. Inventors do important jobs, sure. But who will market the inventions and risk capitals and so on?

Makerbot Inc is making lot of money with open hardware while also doing some R&D to improve their products. They're making it big without patents. Arguably, patents would actually impedes the growth of small hacker enterprise like Makerbot Inc.

The problem with patents in this article isn't the patent itself, but the fact that it covers software, which is 50% math and 50% business process and shouldn't ever have been patentable in the first place.

Have you ever look at the history of patents and their economic consequences? Patents doesn't disclose secrets or whatever consequences you imagine. It shift technological research from secretive inventions to easily reverse engineered inventions, but doesn't increase them. They are more deadweight costs rather than incentive.

Patents are the problem. However, nobody ever brother to look into the history of patents, much less question their assumption.
Go to amazon and search for the book called 'Cashvertising".
Sounds like someone needs to make an android app that combines all the markets into an easy to use UI. ;)
The User is the Anonymous Web Designer
Payday loans probably are superior to some I-can't-believe-it-isn't-credit options in terms of APR: for example, if you're about to miss a utility payment, get the power turned off, and get hit with a $50 fee for getting it turned back on again N days later, then a payday loan strictly dominates the implicit APR of getting credit extended by your utility company and the lights stay on and you suffer no social embarrassment. You could come up with similar examples for automobile breakdowns (best alternative to getting a loan: losing your job), bouncing rent checks, paying overdraft fees at a real financial institution, etc etc.

I still would go back to cleaning oil pipes with a toothbrush prior to working for them, though, regardless of how much money they were prepared to throw at me. Like Thomas mentions below, they are a loathsome industry.

I strongly believe there is an opportunity here: just like FICO and credit cards made short-term loans effectively free for much of the middle class or like how competition and technology has brought the price of remittances to Mexico to below the cost of a Big Mac, I think there is some combination of technology and innovative products which should bring the cost of short-term loans down by more than an order of magnitude for the poor. Maybe it resembles a credit union account. Maybe it is something weird, like cell phone companies moving further into the consumer credit space. (It might not be obvious, but cell phone contracts are economically equivalent to an extension of credit, and they're made to work profitably among populations that no sane financial institution would touch.) But we can do this better.
You cleaned oil pipes with a toothbrush?
That's a farcical argument.

X% of people will also default on their home-loans. Ergo, no-one should offer them.

X% of people will default on service payments. X% of people will never claim on their insurance. X% of your customers will never go from 'trial' to 'customer'.

Every business requires examination of the risks and amortization via the costs. So yes, some of their clients will go bankrupt. The rest will be charged high fees. And the pay day loaner? They will make a moderate amount of money, because they DON'T GET BACK THE DEFAULTED LOANS.

They're not taking someone's house when they don't pay back, they're just losing their loan amount entirely.
Everything about a court case is a conditional. It is relatively unusual for the evidence to be so clear-cut that there is no doubt about the verdict, and often a court must make the fairest decision it can based on far less evidence than it might like.

That said, this isn't really a hypothetical issue. Our courts function in this way every day. Please understand that to those of us on this side of the Atlantic, everything you are describing just sounds weird. "Judiciary corrupted by electioneering"? Judges responding "non-punitively"? Our judiciary in the UK has a long and honourable tradition of being the standard-bearers of justice that one would hope they would be, and of resisting politicisation far more effectively than the other major branches of government (to the extent that we have them; our system doesn't treat US-style separation of powers as sacrosanct either).

Having been in a court on a couple of occasions, although never as a plaintiff or defendant, I have always been impressed by the way the officials conducted themselves. IMHO, our legal system does have its problems when it comes to handling relatively low-value cases, but those are more due to the time and effort required to figure out how the system works and complete all the paperwork than because the legal fees are prohibitive.

One injustice I have personally witnessed happened when someone was cleared of a motoring offence, on the second hearing since the first was aborted when courtroom time ran out for that day. That person lost had two days of their life attending court, and presumably also spent considerable time planning their defence (as they were not legally represented). They must also have had the stress and uncertainty from waiting nearly a year to hear the verdict, and presumably lost out on some income that would have been earned on those days they were in court, because even though they were cleared of all charges, defendants do not even seem to get the same expense refunds that witnesses do. I find the fact that someone deemed not guilty in court should still be harmed even to that extent to be unfair. I simply do not understand how any system where someone innocent might wind up paying out hundreds or thousands in a settlement because the danger of having to pay for their own defence in court would be even more could possibly be in the interests of justice.
Check out my Re-Startup.. Rails powered flash gaming site
I'm the sole creator, and the site has been around for quite a while, but I just relaunched it with a completely new backend built on Rails 3. It's been a long time coming, and I have big plans for the future. Anyway, I would love to hear your opinions and feedback.
From details on ZestCash's website, there are four fairly substantial ways in which they are different than payday loans, which the original author seemed to dismiss.

First, ZestCash is charging a substantially lower APR than payday loan shops (280% versus 480%).

Second, ZestCash allows partial repayment. This is critical, as requiring full repayment is a major factor in forcing payday loan customers to rollover their loans, incurring additional fees and leading to additional loans. Partial repayment is far more likely to result in a customer who can actually pay off their loan and is not trapped in a cycle of debt.

Third, ZestCash further increases the chances of repayment by allowing flexibility in both amount and length of the loan.

Fourth, as the Center for Responsible lending points out, most payday loan employees are minimum wage and not trained to help customers in any way. Anyone approved at ZestCash gets a personal representative who will work with the customer 1-on-1 for the life of the loan.

Time will tell whether the ZestCash team is able to generate positive change for the underbanked -- full disclosure, I've worked with Douglas and think he's very sharp -- but I certainly think their story is a lot more balanced than the original article would suggest.
Maybe people should be limited to X downvotes per minute, in the same way long comment threads are time-limited.

Give someone a cool down period between downvotes, to keep the heat of emotion out of it.
What does the political climate have to do with it? Bigger credit risks require a bigger interest rate to make up for the risk.
I wouldn't be surprised if x86 is now cheaper than crypto cards.
I think that any entrepreneur needs to evaluate their position before they ever enter an industry. Walking blindly into business is rarely a mistake people can afford to make.

You need to either asks yourself (1) can I generate insane conversion or users or (2) how will I monetize the business. If you can generate the user base that Facebook, Twitter or drop box has then monetization is irrelevant because any effective and intelligent management team can devise a business model when the customers have already walked into the store. I can't remember exactly but I think Ron Conway said that you don't need a business model when you have traffic like google's.

But if you can't generate the users, then you need a plan to take to the bank. So, I think that if the ny tech meetup can't be realistic then it's like masturbation. It's great until you realize that you're screwing yourself lol.
You Are Unlikely To Prosper
The people who get these will never qualify for a loan on Prosper or Lending Tree due to low credit ratings, etc.
Related startups in this space - BranchOut, Jibe, Identified.
For the love of god, give chargify a rest.

Decision process: does chargify work for you at a price that is better than the competitors? Then use them. If they don't? Use a competitor or roll your own.

This online shitfest about their pricing is the stupidest thing I've seen on HN.
New Start-Up Feedback
My start-up has just launched our new web-based software in private beta. It is free until public launch in January 2011 in order to maximize users and, most importantly, user feedback. If anyone would like to try out the software and send us feedback, can you follow the link below? We are looking for UI and functionality feedback and any other suggestions.

Thank you!

http://appsoncloud.com/
Babies can't tell the difference between robots and humans.
The troubling fact from an investors perspective is that for a bit.ly, the domain is nearly essential. Investing in a company where such a valuable asset is vulnerable to the whims of a dictator or third-world bureaucrat is unwise, to say the least.
i was trying to explain to a friend yesterday what a "meaty" article is, I think I'll just show him this and forget it.

1. Speaking from experience and with expertise as opposed to random analytical arguments that may or may not be true.

2. Holds back very little, tons of useful and concrete advice.

3. Not common sense, lots of insight that leaves you thinking "wow, yeah."

This is the kind of article that makes HN a great place.
You'd ultimately need to de-politicize the entire branch of government.

You mean de-democratize the entire branch of government?
It does already. So I am killing this.
Turnaround of events where? In your life? Or with Yahoo!?

If something's changed in your life - unforeseen - that makes it more difficult to accept, it'll be easier for everyone to understand and accept. If it's just a case of... "I changed my mind"... well... they'll move on and get over it, but you'll have a bad mark there. The people you let down may remember this, and they move on as well. Basically one changed decision probably won't have much of a difference, but if this is a pattern in life, it'll have longer-term repercussions over taking the gig for several months or a year until something better comes along.
Cashvertising

Cheesy name, excellent book.

An ad execuetive split tests common copywriting techniques. Very helpful http://www.cashvertising.com/
Really though, you can get Grey Goose for thirty bucks a bottle, compared to twenty bucks for something like Absolut or maybe a few dollars less for Smirnoff. If the extra ten dollars a bottle you pay to drink the better vodka is a significant part of your budget, you'd have to be drinking way too much vodka.

Now, if you're paying $300 for the same bottle of Grey Goose in order to get "VIP" table service at some nightclub, then that falls into the dumbass-desire-to-signal-wealth category.