skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been in your position, quit, and failed horribly. My primary weakness as a programmer is lack of focus/tendency to get distracted and as such I was forced to recognize that I work best in a (preferably small) company. As such, here's my advice:

Hack after hours and put it on github so people can see the commit history. If you're not motivated enough to write it in the evenings after working a full day, you're probably not going to be motivated enough to do your own startup/freelancing setup successfully.

Once you've made something interesting, find companies that interest you, email them and describe why you're interested in them, that you're looking to get out of the corporate world, and that you made this cool thing, are they or someone they know looking for a programmer. You'll be mostly unsuccessful, but having a job gives you plenty of cushion and it only takes one yes.

If you're really serious, fly out to SF for the YC open house coming up. I have no connection to YC aside from rooming with a guy in the program but can attest that getting an in on the YC network will at least get you under consideration at a bunch of places.
"Ultimately, the point of these videos is not for you to sell them on your idea. It's another opportunity for YC to get to know you and your team as people, in a way that words on an application form can't convey."

Yes! We're not looking at the video as a way to understand your idea. That's what the written application is for. And yet so many people sit there in the video reading some prepared text in a monotone, which is not something that makes anyone look smart. Far better not to script the video. I'm not saying you should talk about random personal stuff like your favorite bands. You can talk about the startup. Just don't read a prepared statement. The best thing to talk about might be the background for the startup: how you met and how you got interested in this idea.
Makes me have a good feeling about the app I submitted ... I know single founders are harder to get funding usually, but I'm confident I can find a co-founder in SV :)
We use our own crawler and search systems. We are not targeting Google Alerts power users specifically. Our target user is a busy professional who wants alerts for high level concepts but does not understand or does not have the time to create meaningful search queries.

Additionally we offer contact monitoring on a scale that is not feasible with Google Alerts (think about using Google Alerts for more than 30 people, it's a tedious task and the emails are just noise).
They owe them the decency not to change the terms of the license mid-stream. The nice thing about Rails, it's on a MIT license which can not be revoked. You can build on rails with the confidence that at least the current version of the software is yours forever.

Chargify is clearly in the wrong here in my opinion. They gave woefully short notice. They jacked the price, and they left no guarantee that won't do it again. I'd be quite nervous as a customer of Chargify that they might do it again.

I'm the same situation with Twilio. We are, right now, far too dependent on them. So far they've always gone in the other direction (gotten consistently cheaper since the day we signed up), but what happens if they jack their rates?

It's scary...
No, I'm referring to the Google Gmail app. Although Google owns Android, there is a large distinction between the open-source Android base and the closed-source Google apps. K9 sounds like a fine improvement over the stock email app, and an example of what would happen if Google would release the Gmail app as open-source. Yet they choose not to --- why?
I can fully agree :)
This 60mph landspeed limit isn't true in non-North American countries. High speed trains are a reality in many other places, where they actually invest in infrastructure. And let's not forget the German autobahn (where I recently drove 125mph for more than an hour at a time… sweet!).
A Hypothesis Concerning the Perceived Break of the Curveball
Twitter doesn't run on one server either. In fact there was talk a while back that some particularly famous users have an entire server's worth if traffic.
Ask HN: For a UX heavy webapp, JS or Python? 
As I venture out into the maze of options for coding a webapp I am totally baffled as to which direction to begin. I am learning both Python and JS, but the frameworks are numerous and increasing daily. Either will work for the logic and data part, but which is easier to create a decent UX (which frameworks). It doesn't have to be the newest and hippest, but stable and not likely to disappear. Any advice would be much appreciated.
No one looks at actual karma numbers. It's more that if I see a name I recognize from HN, I pay special attention. E.g. if patio11 applied, I'd definitely notice, just like a lot of HN readers probably would.
As I understand it, arewefastyet.com was created as more of an internal/community dashboard specifically for the JIT team at Mozilla rather than to reflect on the browser as a whole to the userbase.
> ... and losing his job

is the biggest factor in "medical bankruptcies".

If you can't work because you're sick, you're going to have financial problems because the "cost of life" bills (food, shelter, transportation, heat/cooling) still come in. Healthcare doesn't address this, so it's absurd to bring up "medical bankruptcies" as an argument wrt healthcare.
The most important line was this.

At zferral, we spent several weeks of development time testing and integrating our application with Chargify. In salary alone, this cost was in the thousands…

This tells me that free was not the price that should have been charged in the first place.
6 Ways to Structure Your Company for Happy Employees
Koi: A Programming Language (parser, compiler, vm) written in Ruby
I agree with points 2 and 3 but point #1 is a big stretch. Drop that and people will take the article more seriously.

Chargify isn't blaming their customers for incorrect assumptions, but their customers are feeling the effects of their incorrect assumptions.

With the way things are now at Chargify it costs more to maintain/support a current customer than that customer generates in revenue. You can afford to grandfather old accounts if you can still at least break even on those accounts. If you can't then you have to do something like what Chargify did or your business will cease to exist. The key is to do all that you can to not put yourself in the position that your support costs are so high that you can't be profitable on existing customers.

I blogged more about it here:

http://www.bluemangolearning.com/blog/2010/10/building-scala...
What A Mobile Phone Looked Like In 1964...And There Were Over A Million Of Them
We just went and interviewed the guys above or asked thme for guest posts. You have to think how to serve their interests (traffic / exposure / relationships with a potentially cool company).

That totally makes sense. But if this is early in Mint's history then what's the benefit for them? I'm assuming it's not traffic or exposure since they already have it, right? This is a situation that applies to a lot of startups. What do they have to offer early on?
Ironically, I find myself self-censoring with a fake identity in HN more than in real life.

A few comments ago, I posted something (which netted me total, about -40 points) that I wouldn't have hesitated to say IRL. And I also posted it under my real name on Facebook (a friend posted the same article there.)

But I did hesitate to post it here. And there are many occasions when there are things I haven't said that I would in person.

And that's because unlike real life, how much you "downvote" is invisible. Downvoting someone else has no consequences for you. There are new HN controls (like you can't downvote responses to your posts) but that still is a blade of grass on a lawn.

In the real world, people might think less of you if you say something (some might consider) sexist, but they're not going to do anything to you at all. So you're protected from backlash. But when people are allowed to anonymously punish you, it makes you hesitate a bit more.
Sadly this exact fix seems to have caused my WLAN lockups.

After enabling it the GPS accuracy improved, but I noticed that my WLAN would be shot almost every morning (stuck in state "turning off...", could only be revived by rebooting).

After reverting the GPS settings to "standalone" a couple days ago I have not seen any more WLAN lockups.

My suspicion is that the fix causes the GPS subsystem to force-enable WLAN at regular intervals when it tries to pull updates from the internet server. This "force-enabling" seems to confuse the regular android/samsung WLAN manager and leaves it in a broken state as described above...

Either way, not an acceptable state of affairs for what is supposed to be a high-end smartphone.
I think you mean 'deluded', though they're probably disillusioned too.
Clickable: https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dGhkXzJEX2h...
Priority Inbox treats a symptom, instead of the problem:

Why do you have people sending you so much junk email that you can't read it all?

Is ignoring those people really better than telling them not to send so much junk?
Yes, that's why I referred to "his Circos package"
Well, it is kind of old news now, it's been around for years
New Relic for (almost) Everyone .NET & PHP support + new round of funding
I agree with this. It is a crucial app that anyone would pay for. The gateway alone is about $100/mo. so it is not like we expect it for free.

As I have stated in the comments, the issue is that the price change was not grandfathered is a slippery slope...
The Organizing Gap
Rails 3 trouble with mysql on OS X - Mobtown Labs
I have actually, that's the book I took with me. It made me understand the language more and just highlighted how it has an interesting model behind it (e.g., prototype and async) and a pretty bad syntax in front of it (e.g., constructor stuff).
> Don't take investor money if you want to work on one company for your entire career.

So investors don't like companies like Microsoft, Oracle, or Google, where the founders have stayed on long-term? I can see investors not wanting companies with no liquidity events, but that doesn't require the founders to literally exit the company.
> This group gets free health care via IHS (I believe it is structured similarly to Britains NHS)

IHS is pretty much a horrorshow. It's one of the best arguments against govt-run healthcare.

It doesn't much matter if some govt somewhere can run healthcare well. The US govt runs healthcare badly. Fix that first.
If you use http://springloops.com/ to host your Subversion repositories, they let you script automatic deployments upon commits to your repositories.
It makes the job of prospective employers easier. I want to work at places that hired me eyes-wide-open. If they can handle my real self then I can be my real self.

Not pretending to be someone else leaves more brain processing power for doing work.
Yes, or sometimes even less rigour than this: run some data and see if the results "look right".

This is the standard procedure for when you've developed a complex algorithm to do something novel, and actually working through it by hand would take hours.

I should know, this is how I used to do it before I knew better, and as a result one of my published papers has (very slight) numerical errors in.
My experience has been that Ruby allows to achieve what you need at your pace, and learn what you need as you go.

When you start to learn C, you really have a couple of technical points to understand before being able to print a simple hello world.

Sidenote but I'm thankful to Matz for creating a language that makes disciplined programmers able to create highly maintainable code bases, too (I find it's easier than in C# or Java at least in my experience).
Bump iPhone app now lets you send “location snapshots” to friends
This[1] StackOverflow thread answers this question pretty thoroughly. Unfortunately it looks like if you want it to be legal, you should be prepared to pay a hefty (> 4 figures) monthly subscription fee.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/57106/anyone-know-of-an-n...
Thank you. I am glad you understood the gist of my post. The point of the FREEMIUM argument is to show:

1) There is substantial value here companies will pay for.

2) We are investing in the company, and there is an expectation of fairness & consistency.
-40 is kinda harsh.

Did you murder a puppy and admit to it or something like that ?
We use capistrano with multi-stage deployment. There is a recipe called "railsless-deploy" that removes all the rails dependent processes (http://github.com/leehambley/railsless-deploy). We also use the "git-deployment" recipe which does auto tagging of staging and production pushes (http://github.com/apinstein/git-deployment).
Echo those other comments, I'm in a similar scenario. My email's in my profile if you want to exchange ideas. My thoughts: happiness comes from loving what you do. I guess you have to choose the right moment and hopefully find something you love.
Compute command-line arguments with Apache Commons CLI
There is a massive difference between a scratchpad of calculations, and a simulation involving thousands or millions of data points.
I was seriously looking at working with Chargify for our business www.getdashboard.com as they had been doing a great job at marketing themselves and starting to build a community around their brand. Obviously when looking at a company that will be handling your money or at least a big part of your financial process one must do all due diligence. I heard Mr. Hauser speak at a conference and all I can say is that I got a good read on the guy. He sounded cocky and prideful, however he did sounds and spoke as a very smart guy. As Jeff points out in his blog post, trust is one if not the most important factor in any web business specially in one like chargify.

In terms of the freemiun model, Jeff is 100% right. The integration time alone is worth 1000s of dollars. when choosing a billing system one has to weight everything including trust and expenditure.

One thing I want to point out. I don't know the ins and outs of chargify's business and this may very well be a 100% needed change in order for them to stay in business. I don't know and I won't judge.
In my previous development experience for a fantasy gaming website, I dealt with Stats Inc and the API/datasets they provided.

Without permission I don't think it would be fair for me to provide you a direct contact, but they did offer all of the data our site required, in useable formats.

Our initial site only dealt with the NBA as they provided the best avenue for use of their logos and player names.

Feel free to contact me more directly if you want a bit more info.

Best of luck!
Ask HN: Considering quitting my day job to work on my startups 
I launched two start ups about three months ago while still working a full time job. I honestly hoped that things would progress slowly with them and I wouldn't be overwhelmed or burn out. That turned out to not be the case. After launching, I no longer control the pace of things that go on and I find myself constantly focusing on them instead of my day job. My productivity over the past couple of weeks has dropped to almost nothing because I'm coding all day and all night. I'm not really even interested in the projects I'm working on at my day job anymore either. There are really two things that are holding me back right now:

1) The combined net incomes from both ventures is not enough to fully support my financially right now (not to mention I have partners for both companies so it's not like I can take all of the profit for myself anyway). I've got enough savings to support myself for about a year with zero income, so I've got a bit of a runway to see if things will work out and find a job if I need to, but it's still a large gamble.

2) My employer is already trying to hire another developer and has been trying to do so for a few months. Considering how hard of a time they're having finding one developer, I'm concerned that my leaving would put them in a very bad situation. I'm really good friends with everyone at the company and I'm worried that there might be some resentment towards me if I do leave. Then again, I'm not giving them 100% and that isn't fair to them anyway. If I don't quit it's possible that I might be fired down the road anyway.

Have any of you gone through this before? Anyone have any advice? Is there anything I'm probably not thinking about that might blindside me down the road?

Thanks!
I really strongly believe that an idea has no value at
all, simply a big fat '0'. And chances are that if you
have a particular idea that 10 other guys have it too.

And if 10 guys implement the same idea, everyone gets the benefits of competition, too, including additional innovations on the idea.
It sounds like you just said that your argument is "Chargify produced something with substantial value that companies will pay for, and we've invested in Chargify by using it without paying."
(28) got me thinking, the technology is ready to get DJ's to telecommute to the parties.
(Slightly related to the poll topic) I used to follow a technical blog and had also exchanged couple of emails with its author. Though the author of the blog does not use his real identity on HN, I was able to easily recognize the author based on the topics he comments on, his opinions on the topic and "tone" of the comments.

Thus, it should be possible for an "intelligent program" to pick these weak signals across the interweb to identify the person behind it.
I too have wondered about this for a couple of minor side projects. I've always resorted to scraping, but it feels wrong and I know it's not feasible for commercial projects.

I've always assumed that there was some commercial data source out there that would provide all of this information in a nice, structured format for some kind of fee, but I have yet to find it.

One nice thing about major sites moving to "live" scoreboards is that you can often find nicely structured data sources behind them. For instance, here's the NFL's live score feed, in JSON:

http://www.nfl.com/liveupdate/scores/scores.json

(Unfortunately, it's empty as I write this because there are no games going on right now. Here's an example taken late on a Sunday or on Monday morning: http://gist.github.com/626612)

Another, related question is how to get good gambling information (point spreads, totals, etc.) for the same use case. I think this might be easier, as I've come across various sports book sites in the past that offer subscription services.

On Yahoo's NFL odds page, it says their data source is OddsShark (http://www.oddsshark.com/) whose home page advertises

Offer comparative live odds and other sports stats on your site FREE of charge.

You pick the sportsbooks, you pick the bet types and OddsShark.com sports betting odds engine does the rest, delivering feeds to your site.

I got in touch with them, but never received a response...
How Should San Francisco Plan for Sea-Level Rise?
Everyone will do an interview. They want the links and possibly free traffic for minimal work. It did help that I personally knew them. Once you get interviewed, you are pretty likely to promote it if it's a good reference.

The issue is most people approach it with generic template emails and crappy questions.
Windows Phone 7 developer resources – start building cool apps now
I can't tell if you're all set or not. If not, let me know! peldi@balsamiq.com - direct feed URL to my new blog is here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheBalsamiqBlog
Check out Stats.com

They provide realtime and archived feeds of games and statistical data for most of the major sports.
Have you had problems where Firefox 4 just fails miserably to render a page, but if you refresh it renders fine?
roadbikereview.com and mtbr.com are good sites for bike related reviews.
RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms
Yes. It is scary. It is also the nature of working with new companies who are, just like you, trying to find their footing in the marketplace. You clearly want predictable pricing and delivery. Every business wants predictable pricing and delivery. What you don't appear to grasp is that established businesses pay a premium for predictable pricing and delivery.

If you want to lock in a rate with Twilio or Chargify or anybody else, get their CEO on the phone and get a contract in place. That's what real businesses do. But don't be surprised to find out that the price for (say) Twilio to lock in a permanent price for you is higher than you want to pay.

You're a startup. You should understand what it means to work with one.
You mean like tircd or twircd?

http://github.com/kore/twircd
http://code.google.com/p/tircd/
I'm guessing it was this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1784086
Find the perfect App with GetApp.com
Speaks a lot about the Ruby community that the answer here is not "rtfm". Typically there ISN'T a 'fm' to be found, and who knows how the code's getting monkeypatched, even by the library itself. So no, I don't trust that because I read the subset of code re: the thing that I care about that I fully understand the ramifications. I'm also guessing that the OP gets paid by the hour.
I'd love to see him stick to the grandfather commitment after a few years of inflation, but I digress.

Going with a startup like Chargify is a risk, they will pivot, they will change. What if they'd gone bust?

Freemium isn't a particularly sensible model for something like Chargify. The author said he'd 'spent' money on it in terms of development costs. It's a lesson. Think before you buy. Don't expect any freemium service to continue giving you something for free.
The other advantage is sometimes, in emergency situations, I've had to edit the production code directly on the server. It's nice to be able to see what's changed, commit if necessary, or rollback to the original production version.
Ask HN:With the talk of Chargify recently ...
There are several products like Chargify, but now Google checkout is about to start recurring payments and subscription billing. It is currently in Beta, but I am integrating it into one of my sites, and it seems nice. Google is well trusted by people, so it may be better than a company like Chargify that most people probably haven't hear of. it also allows for item purchases at the same time as a subscription. So a customer can order Widget 1, and a 1 year support subscription for Widget 1.
"Create a decent UX" is pretty vague. You need a framework for doing what? MVC? UI?

On the server-side, python is more mature/well-supported. On the client-side, javascript is currently the only serious option.
A slippery slope to what?
The New App Stores Economy
I understand the video is important - but what if we can't get round to making it in time?

My cofounder currently lives the other side of the country (we're currently studying in different colleges) and so a video together would be kinda hard at the moment, not to mention expensive to meet up.

Do you have any suggestions - we've looked into recording Skype video calls but it's hard to make it feel natural.