skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's how I would do it...and I grant that this may be overcomplicated.

1) Set up a script that spools all existing customers into Post Affiliate Pro (PAP) and gives each of them a unique ID

2) Set a similar script to run when a new customer places an order (enter new customer into PAP database and generate referral ID)

3) Set up a page on my customer portal that allows each customer to see his/her referral ID and gives a bunch of choices to refer friends (email with a plugin that finds all friends in address book for services like Gmail/Yahoo; banner ads; text link). Pull the link by sending an auth token with the customer ID to the PAP API.

^ In #3 above I'd do this instead of referring them to the PAP customer portal, which seems overkill for this scenario, and would set up a multiple login nightmare.

4) Integrate PAP and my shopping cart/customer database so when a customer refers another customer and that referral is approved, it shows up as a credit in their account.

Of the above, #4 is the tricky part, and depends on their shopping cart/billing software. It may be easier to hire a VA to manage this, at least at the beginning, esp. if the customer database is homegrown.

Disclaimer: PAP or iDev may have easier ways to do this; this is based on my own experience with PAP, which was admittedly a different integration. But as a programmer, this is the working thesis I'd start from.
There are solid laws and remedies in place for when someone steals money from your bank account. This happens all the time at banks and they just replace your money without even telling you. Mint and Intuit have every incentive in the world to protect your money.

Giving out your twitter/facebook/gmail password is much more dangerous because there are no easily enforceable laws in place for when someone spams all your contacts, damages your reputation, or locks you out of your web accounts.
This technology could be amazing. Currently, about 50% of the time, if I spell something wrong or type a name that's not in the dictionary, my phone replaces my entry with something radically and comically different. With four additional degrees of freedom to play with, I'm sure they can get that percentage up to over 99%.
Yes, I am very uncomfortable with the logic that since Wesabi didn't lay out their every effort to save the company, they must therefore not have put any thought into it. That's an unjustified leap; perhaps they didn't think it made for a very interesting read, if nothing else.
The amazing power of networks
Looks like cool technology, but Swype still is faster and provides a better interface.
Yahoo News Ask America~
Tips for running a hackathon
Adam Savage Presents Problem Solving: How I Do It
I think that was the result of Dyson's study - a gunner never saw a fighter so they could just as effectively be removed or repalced with fixed guns.

And in Wald's research a night fighter still had some difficulty finding and approaching abomber even with ground radar - so they fired at it (using proximty fuses or upward firing guns) essentially at random points - there was no statsistical bias of the fighter pilot targetting specific systems
Now all we need is BlindSwype. The functionality of both products aren't mutually exclusive!
Detroit's story of a working-class town that failed to evolve is depressingly familiar throughout the US in many small towns whose main industries have moved on - for example, the old railway towns. I feel these towns die because they lack the critical mass of people with a culture that embraces technology and change.

Unfortunately, the pain that comes with this evolutionary process is probably unavoidable. To change it would require a wholesale change in culture - something that takes a generation, if not more.
You wrote, "for now it's too early to specialize in just one". That's the opposite of commonly recommended strategy. You specialize when you start out, not later on. You diversify when you have some amount of success.

Anyway, to answer your original question: go to a bookstore. Contact the author directly with your offer. It's possible the author will have the rights to put the content into an iPhone app. Even if he doesn't, he's probably got lots of other content that hasn't been published.

If you want to think bigger, contact the publisher directly. They have lots of authors and you may be able to negotiate a deal.

Alternatively, look at websites, blogs and such. Contact those authors.
Seems like you are looking for our service - nextbee.com :) For under the hood details about the system do check (http://support.nextbee.com/faqs)
Time Warner and Time Warner Cable are not the same company. TWC was spun-off last year, and Aol is also no longer a part of Time Warner.
This guy is an absolute moron. TechCrunch is going to sell for LESS THAN 1x REVENUES??? Based on this idiot's shitty wannabe banker comp model?
This is a good statement from an accomplished, successful and apparently happy person who gives some credit to her parents for exposing her to computer programming and computer systems starting at the age of seven. What's not to like about this message?
As an aside AFAIK many financial advisors have used aggregation services (CashEdge, ByAllAccounts, uMonitor), which require their clients to log in and provide essentially the same access to their financial institutions, for quite some time. I believe Yodlee was one of the first to make their aggregation services available to a consumer based business vs. an advisor.

In addition the onus of primary security (username/password) rests with the service provider (Yodlee), if I understand things correctly Mint would only store a unique identifier to access a user's information via a Yodlee API call. So after transaction data has been scrubbed it would be extremely difficult for a hacker to access a user's bank account information from Mint.

You're still very much correct if Yodlee has a security slip, but their business depends on securing that information.
If it's like any other matchmaking site they'll let you know that people holla'd, but won't let you re-holla until you open up that wallet.
The thing that kept me from ever using Mint is that they said they then give your username and password to someone else without ever specifying who that is. Now I know that it's Yodlee, but there was no way I'm giving my password to someone when I don't even know who I'm giving it to.
Glory!
Well, a billion dollar company might enable you to make a 'bigger' difference. You help make your employees wealthy (Google's millionaire emplyees), you help shape whatever sector you're in (hopefully for the better). You create value for you shareholders. Everyone's a winner, theoretically.
The iPhone never left the ground; they used it to receive the GPS signal from the balloon.
have you tried headless eclipse and vim?
http://eclim.org/
Forget HFT by yourself, at least until you've done some things and learned what it really requires. The barriers to entry are multiple and substantial, and you can't figure out how to eliminate one unless you're really good with the others.

Like any substantial / difficult / well-rewarded pursuit, plan on this taking 12+ months to be even minimally viable.

Minimum viable product = Interactive Brokers account, automated via one of their API wrappers, with custom logic. This will get you to where you can modify orders ~ 10x per second, which is often enough that you're going to learn so much you don't even know what the questions are yet....

If you do all that and want to press forward, usually the next correct step (again assuming you're writing ALL the logic, risk handling, etc.) is something like Lime.

"backtest my algorithms"... historical data isn't free, nor is any decent source of it

"execute trades quickly"... what's the definition of quickly? there are systems currently active that can process an execution and have a response on the wire in less than 25us... that's 25 millionths of a second for wire-to-wire processing...

Realize this: you are expressing a desire to play one of the most difficult games on the planet. In this game you do not get to choose your opponents. However, you can know that it's very, very unlikely that you know or can do anything they don't or can't.
Every one of those is on my list :)

I've read Watchmen, Everything is Illuminated, and Slaughterhouse Five. All were fantastic. The film adaptation of Everything is Illuminated was actually very good too.
The latest version of HTML has the ability to do offline apps. i.e. you write your application in Javascript as a webapp, and it can run offline. You can store data locally in the browser and get javascript notifications when you are back online so you can sync.
Truly painful. That felt a little like a rick roll.
The debate is for people/companies who have a choice-- obviously you're right about the fact that there's no debate where there is no choice. Mint sold for $150m, but perhaps could've aimed bigger. Blogger sold pretty early-- perhaps they could've been/beaten WordPress. Google famously tried to sell for $1m to Excite. LOTS of companies who sell early have an opportunity to aim bigger.

I think partial cash-out Series B rounds are a good development which allows founders to have their cake and eat it too. Aaron Patzer probably could've raised a big Series B, pocketed a few million for himself and retained a fairly massive chunk of ownership.
Really? I've read both (along with several other Vonnegut books), and I thought S5 was much more though provoking. Given how quickly his books read, I might have to reread Breakfast of Champions.
Good advice. Beyond that, I recommend surrounding yourself with critical, intelligent, trustworthy people. I bounce all my ideas off a core group of friends, and generally don't bother with anything until they all give the green light. Besides that, it's just ROI/risk evaluation. Unless you're already a millionaire, it is best to focus on lowest possible investment for the highest likely return. Later it may be worth taking bigger risks.
I've long used jEdit as my text editor of choice for coding html, perl and php. jEdit is pretty much just another in its class that will give you syntax highlighting, regex search and replace, macros, and a few other nifty programmer-friendly features, just like BBEdit, UltraEdit, etc. What I really like about jEdit, personally, is that it's built in Java, and so it's pretty much identical on Mac, Windows and Linux. This is key when moving back and forth a lot, as I sometimes do.

Depending on what kind of programming you do, though, I'm going to have to agree with the other posters who've suggested vim or emacs. I'm a vim person, myself, but there's nothing wrong with emacs at all. I guess, go for vim if you really want to go minimal; go for emacs if you want to simplify with the ability to build out your text editor into an IDE.

The big reason I say you might as well go for vi or emacs, though, is because without an IDE, you will likely need to spend more time at the command line - whether that means running your compiler, firing up your debugger, etc.

I never bothered learning some of the more advanced techniques with vi, but I've written some fairly big projects in a terminal using screen, vi and "perl -d". One little tip I think is worth passing along: I declare my functions in perl like this:

sub my_method_name # the method that does that thing and returns a hashref

{

..

}

The reason I think this is worth mentioning is because it saves me so much time when working in a terminal with a minimal toolkit: I run "grep -nr ^sub" and it returns all my method definitions with a brief (one line) description. The output from that grep is like a mini "whatis" database o my codebase.
When I'm coding in Java, I generally just use TextWrangler (on OSX) or kate (on linux) as my editor, and commandline tools like ant and git to manage everything else.

I think C# needs an IDE like VS more than Java, if only because it doesn't have a standardized high-quality documentation tool equivalent to javadoc. For many .Net libraries, intellisense is the only source of documentation, and MSDN docs are rarely very helpful.
Since you mentioned 'eye-opening fiction' I give you my wholehearted recommendation for Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality:

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_M...

Don't be misled by the 'fanfic' tag, it's a mere shell for a very deep piece of work, endorsed by Eric S. Raymond and David Brin. Many have accused the author for slipping in a lot of his own voice, calling it his own 'Atlas Shrugged', but seeing as you liked that, I think you'll find this a pleasure, too.
PC-lint (http://www.gimpel.com/) gives a "Warning 564: variable 'x' depends on order of evaluation" for your first example, but is silent on the second.
Ask HN: Public Liability Insurance
Despite initial emails indicating otherwise, it now transpires that the event I'm running in November will require me to have PLI. It will be talks, coffee, tea, biscuits, a meal, and some puzzles. No children under 14.

Any recommendations for a supplier in the UK? We only need to cover the activities we're providing, not the venue as a whole.

All suggestions and advice gratefully received.

If you'd like an update about what I discover, comment below and I'll let you know.
The higher a monkey can climb, the more he shows his tail.

That said this article brought a tear to my eye.
There were more:

Eventually Mallocs All Computer Storage.

Emacs Makes A Computer Slow.

About the only one that's still true now is this:

Escape Meta Alt Control Shift.
Installing Nginx With PHP5 And MySQL Support On CentOS 5.5
Safety Pin Beautification
The more an idea seems simple the more you will ponder about how come you didn’t come up with it first! This idea includes safety pins that beautify Lucy McRae’s body.
What Can Search Predict?
Hesse has come highly recommended. I added several of his books to my list of must-reads. I did a little research on Borges and think I'll have to read some of those stories. I think Unbearable Lightness of Being was recently adapted into a movie, as I didn't know it was a book. Will check it out.
> With all the tools at the cmdline, you can do anything.

only if your definition of 'everything' is limited, all the refactorings in a half-decent ide are quite hard to get right with awk & sed.
For what is worth, even something as simple as finding all elements in a type hierarchy are quite unobvious to do with shell tools for me.
Personally, I use emacs, and that's what I would recommend, but here's a more interesting idea:

Eclipse is built on an application platform called Eclipse RCP. A minimal Eclipse RCP app is just a window with nothing in it. No menus, no editors, no file browsers, just a blank window. (I'm not even sure you need the window these days.) You could start with that -- call it Zeroclipse -- and build up what you wanted. Want a text editor? Add in the Eclipse text editor. Don't like it? Change it; disable and rewrite whatever features you want. Want it to parse and colorize your code? Find that feature and enable it. Write your own keyboard bindings from scratch.

Want refactoring support? Add that plugin and provide some key bindings or menu items. Don't want it? You'll never see it. Even better, the refactoring support will never get loaded and won't even get deployed with the application.

Your IDE (if you want to call it that) will consist exactly of the features that you enabled or implemented. If you think an IDE should be a big code window plus a pane to the left cycling through readouts of cyclomatic complexity, the latest sports scores, and tomorrow's weather report, you can have that. If you want it to track the time you spend typing, or the time you have each file open or focused, you can do that, too. And if you don't want it to constantly recompile your code while you type and pester you with autocomplete suggestions, it won't.

This won't be a fun little weekend project. Eclipse RCP is a huge system that takes a lot of time to get oriented in. But I bet you'll learn something about your development process. A hundred hackers doing this would probably discover some pretty radical and useful ideas.

HNers should chime in with suggestions about alternative IDE platforms to build on. Just don't say emacs....
Ask HN: Can you recommend a virtual personal assistant agency?
After reading some articles about virtual personal assistants, I want to ask the community, if they know of any good site to find me an assistant paid on an hourly basis for some research tasks I have to get done(i.e. finding tables of measurement data in a certain format). The tasks are not as simple as ordering food, but on a level low enough, so that they can be done by any half-way intelligent person without any previous knowledge on the topic.

I would really like to source some things out. Can you help me?

Edit: After doing some research, I found oDesk almost fits my needs, they are only missing one key feature: Searching for people speaking other languages than English.
I might actually be interested but I still don't quite get it. I joined this site more than a year ago to ask around about learning a programming language so I can make a game (simulation) for educational purposes related to my health site. So far, I haven't learned a programming language. I have a full time job and find myself stuck between a rock and hard place as far as trying to make some kind of side project profitable enough to leave my job.

I don't have an iphone, so maybe that is part of the problem.
Would the regulators permit such a thing?
So this article assumes Google is going to stay flat the next 5 years at 28 billion? Facebook has a lot of catching up to do, but Google isn't planning to sit on its thumbs AFAIK.

As a company, Google is way more important than Facebook. Facebook connects people, something that isn't difficult to do in ten other ways with 100s of different services. Google on the other hand seems to be really trying to change the world. Much like the Virgin Group.

Once the Facebook IPO happens, they would have more than enough cash to do anything they want. Which I hope is more inline with these other companies. Going outside their comfort zone and into entirely different industries to use their wealth and resources to make a more impactful difference.
I checked, and apparently they've now invented on-die DRAM that doesn't require extra processing steps. Nice! Die stacking would still have advantages in reducing wire delay (thus reducing the L2 miss penalty) and increasing the yield.
Haha, I have played Bioshock. Twice. Incredible game in every sense: art, story, gameplay, etc. I still need to try the second. I picked up Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land on recommendation from a good friend, but I've yet to read it. I'll have to check out Bryson as I really enjoy reading about science, especially from different perspectives. You never learn as much about something from a single point of view -- life is 3-d.
What does this mean for BlindType on the iPhone?
Your argument is only true for people who have only one business idea. If you have a wealth of ideas, you can execute one and sell at a point that gets security for your self and your family, then execute another and aim bigger, but with your downside risk eliminated.
It seems to me all the answers so far make it look far more complicated than what it actually is.

What I've done is just travel as tourist staying in each country around 3 months.

When I "lived" in Chile I just took weekend 'visa vacations' to Argentina and had my stay extended for another 90 days.

Nothing changed in terms of taxes for me, since I never really become resident of another country.

Earning money online definitely makes things easier since you never have to be paid as a local in whatever country you are at, therefore, not working there illegally or anything like that.

I am not sure how much money your online business makes you, but I usually aim for developing countries, where you can easily live on US $800 - $1200 tops a month. Like bradleyjoyce said I would recommend Latin America. I've lived/traveled/worked in Colombia, Chile, Peru, Argentina, Mexico.

Also, very important, make sure you have someone reliable back home that can help you deal with administrative/misc., stuff like depositing a check, receiving important mail, faxing stuff, and the sort of things you may not be able to do online.
People nicely covered it here. A few other additions:

(a) Why is Sex Fun (http://www.amazon.com/Why-Sex-Fun-Evolution-Sexuality/dp/046...): covers the history of human sexuality

(b) The Prophet: http://www.katsandogz.com/gibran.html

(c) Demon Haunted World by Sagan http://www.amazon.com/Demon-Haunted-World-Science-Candle-Dar... is a nice place to explain the method of science

(d) Sleepwalkers (http://www.amazon.com/Sleepwalkers-History-Changing-Universe...) gives you an idea of how we humans,err,sidetrack and ultimately come to explaining the universe

That should be enough for this summer
This is the ultimate in home flight simulation
Ask HN: What are some good expensive toys?
With all this talk about making billions I have found that most people don't even know what they want to buy with that money. I get the whole "this is a game and we're just doing it for ego" spin, but at some basic level there must be some cool stuff you want to buy.

So my question is, if you exited for millions today, what would you buy?
Ask YC: How do I make the most out of Startup-school?
I was fortunate enough to get accepted to startup-school. I'll be coming on Thursday afternoon, leaving on Monday morning. I've got a couple of desktop product, and I'm seriously working towards my own web-based startup. My questions are:

(1) Besides myself, what should I bring to the conference itself? Will a laptop just be a burden because of lack of space?

(2) Besides a pretty great lineup of speakers, what else should I expect?

(3) Besides pg's essays, is there anything I can do to prep, to make the experience more valuable?

(4) This might seem strange, but I've been dreaming about coming to Silicon Valley ever since I was a kid. I've been to SF once (loved it), but didn't make it to SV. Anything I should not miss in SV while I'm there? I just looked, and it seems most of the Computer History Museum is closed for renovations.

(5) Any other suggestions as to how I can make the most out of the experience?

Thanks.
Rather than founded by surely it was hacked up by. Not everything with a URL is a startup.
There are more choices than just those two, you could simply build a solid business with respectable turnover and a good profit margin.

If you're not looking for your exit too hard it just might come your way anyway, and building a solid business is one way to work towards that goal.

If you're only focused on your exit and it doesn't happen or the timing is off you are probably in a lot of trouble.
Password Security tips
Collection of Password Security tips.
I suppose that makes it a matter of taste. I like my science books to be impersonal, and my political books to be personal. I tend to dislike it when one crosses into the other.
Personally, I don't think Marc gets it at all. He says the goal was to get people to change their financial behavior, and this is a noble goal. Maybe, but so is building a weight loss application for people who don't want to lose weight.
Out of curiosity, did you actually read the article, or did you just comment on the title?

The article used facebook, which already has about $800m in revenue, as a starting point to discuss a major factor of success for social media. He had a good point.

edit/ In fact, his point could be applied very well to the recent Digg fiasco. If they had ranked "relevance to users" as high as "revenue maximization" then they may not have lost so many users.
Thank you very much for your help I will keep on a look out for the status change or any emails that come my way...
In the Real World, though, they'll have an IDE available all the time. So how effective are they with their IDE of choice? That's the question that really matters.

(Long-time Emacs user here. I don't have a horse in this race.)