skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My company is BVI incorporated with a merchant account at HSBC in Hong Kong. My accountant in HK took care of the work. If you want her details just email me (contact in profile). As far as the payment side of things go, just thinking about it makes me feel unclean and I can't honestly recommend anyone. You can find a bunch of overseas credit card processors by Googling around, but you'll start getting offers at around 5% per transaction plus setup fees.

FWIW, this isn't tax avoidance advice - I'm personally incorporated abroad as I'm not American and can't open a business in the United States. If you need credit card processing incorporating a US business is probably the easiest solution. Otherwise, spend the extra $400 it will cost to incorporate in Hong Kong. The extra money is basically the cost for the accounting firm of running a virtual office and doing the perfunctory end-of-year audit. And you'll be able to setup Paypal directly using your corporate address and bank account. The only downside is you will need to pay taxes on SALES to Hong Kong residents. And you should figure out your local tax issues depending on where you live and work.

For what it's worth, I live and work in Asia and am in HK maybe 2-3 times a year and think your concerns aren't an issue. At least not for the next forty or so years.
You could say Clojure is a Java library. It's a single JAR file.
I thought that this was implemented.

I Clojure its like this:
(first []) --> nil

What is in that list?
Answer nothing.

I think thats a way to go too.
مسلسل لالولا الحلقة 31
Ask HN: Looking to join a startup in Montreal
I graduated with a Comp Sci degree from Concordia earlier this year and promptly started working at a corporate job in a stuffy corporate environment. I'm not enjoying it - we support IE6, and the work is mostly editing XML.

I want to stay in this city, but I'm unsure how to go looking for a small company to join. I've checked out montrealtechwatch, but they don't have much going these days.

Does anyone have suggestions, either specific to Montreal or maybe even for any city?

Just in case some of you are from Montreal, I'm a programmer who knows Java and Python, and loves JavaScript. I've got some experience in C++ but none professional.

Thanks HN. :)
How? Just like every other 170+ Million dollar company out there. Show me one that IS NOT using Open Source somewhere in their organization and I'll eat something disgusting.
How carefully have you thought about that?

Are you fine with someone integrating your code into a GPL project that competes with you, and potentially out-competes your project?
Are Music Startups Destined to Fail?
Indeed, specially with the pretty high profile companies using it: LinkedIn, Twitter, FourSquare.
You need to tell them (in the most diplomatic manner possible) that they can't have their cake and eat it.

The can have the work at a fixed price if they want, or they can pay for time but it's unrealistic to expect both. It sounds to me like they were very unhappy with the job that took longer than estimated, and you need to address this if it's the root cause of their change.
Give them high estimates. You taking the risk should cost them a premium. Make sure they understand that. And fix the scope, or they'll try to maximize the amount of time you work for the fixed budget.
Cyprus might be a tax haven, but the accountants will get you. We got a bill for 2,000 euros from our accountant for filing some papers or something. We had, quite literally, three jobs in the past year, totalling 3,000 euros, and the accountant wanted 2/3rds of that to file those three invoices.

I am not sure if you can file taxes without an accountant, but be prepared to pay through the nose for one. Both our lawyer and our accountant also gave us bad advice, like telling us we needed to register for VAT (we didn't), just to get more money out of us. A year later, the company owes the lawyer and accountant more than it ever made, without us ever seeing a single cent.
but think of the bandwidth!
Please don't use this fu* Facebook redirector!
I'd pay just to see it booting. Some university should take this...
And why would any professor presume that their students had ever met the cleaning staff?
I haven't used Clojure, so excuse me if there's something I'm missing here, but doesn't that mean that the following is true?

first [nil] == first []

In which case, I prefer the Haskell way, as it's more specific.
I typically use either BVI or Bahamas simply because it is fast, cheap, and efficient to set up and operate companies in those two places.

The Netherlands Antilles has priced itself out of the market (well, and as such it doesn't exist any more, does it?) and has also introduced a very European corporate income tax.

Cayman companies are a tad pricier than BVI or Bahamas.
Michael Bierut has a funny slide he uses in his presentations, in which he notes that his name is not spelled "Beirut" (like the city in Lebanon).
Something doesn't make sense here. DC Metro's card is made[1] by Cubic Corp[2] which is not in bankruptcy. The general idea of avoiding vendor lock-in is a pretty big deal and the board member's comment in the linked article was right: "And so that we're not just funneling money to people who are real good at intellectual property, but aren't really selling us anything, except a tether to them"

If they really were in bankruptcy it would probably be easy for the DC Metro to buy the technology for pennies and (hopefully) open-source it.

1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SmarTrip

2 http://www.google.com/finance?q=cub
I rather like the way that Facebook handles ads already. Ads can be upvoted, eported for being offensive, and how they are in general out of the way but often interesting (although that gets into the huge privacy issue.. but I can say I've gotten more use out of Facebook ads than anywhere else regardless..)
CMU student counts 547 Robots on Campus
Wow, this line just triggered a memory for me:

I played music really loud and drank Mountain Dew

As an undergrad I briefly had a job in a warehouse somewhere working the midnight shift. I don't remember who I was working for; I'd actually forgotten the whole thing. But reading that line about working late at night brought back a sudden rush of how fun it was. There were two or three guys and we cranked up Brave New Waves (a reliable source for what became known as indie rock) and in between getting the work done played tricks with the fork lifts.

This was not to become my craft, though. Maybe I missed a calling.
When I click on the link to read the sample book, I get instructions considering I'm an iPhone user (I'm on a PC) .Maybe there's some bug in the code for detecting the OS ?
No personal experience, but i have read good things about it.
I think another interesting framework would be:

1. Help someone when it benefits you.

2. Help someone when it is easy/neutral to you.

3. Help someone when it is costly/time-consuming/harmful to you.
For text heavy books I use a Sony PRS-300 eReader. The e-ink is much better for eye strain and the PRS-300 does a fairly good job with PDFs as well as EPUB formats. If I want to copy text I have whatever's on my Sony on the laptop I sync it from so can quickly open it up there but with the reader it's not taking up screen real estate and I can have a bunch of books on there. I can put my annotations on Evernote if I want to.

I also use iBooks on my iPhone and can sync my books to that too, it's nowhere near as good to read on but on a croweded train it's the best given the space available.

For particularly graphics heavy docs, or where colour is important I use my laptop and Foxit PDF or Calibre. This is my last choice.

My favourite by far is the Sony.
Ask HN: Good Programming Search Engines?
Does anyone have any recommendations regarding a good search engine specifically for programming topics? Ideally one which returns discussions or blog posts, rather than source code, explaining concepts, terms, and potentially discussions programmers have online. All non-programming results would be filtered out.

For example, Google "register" or "auto". These are C Storage Class Specifiers, but nothing relevant to C appears in the first 10 results. They're buried under lots of unrelated content. You can slap "+C" and "-C++" to get more specific, but you can quickly amass a very bloated query string. Copying/pasting programming terms out of a PDF for a quick search becomes cumbersome in some cases too. Google/Bing don't appear to have a filter to blot out all non-programming results.

There are plenty of source code search engines out there:

www.google.com/codesearch

www.koders.com

www.github.com

www.bitbucket.com

...and some community forums which do have great content:

www.stackoverflow.com

www.experts-exchange.com

...but no single centralized "Google for Programming". What search engine(s) do you recommend for programming topics? Do you have any search tips/hints to offer others?
You do need to pay $200 for a business license and appoint a registered agent. It looks like the going rate for one of those is $50/mo.
It seems like 90% of the uses for this can be taken care of with xargs:

echo "file1 file2" | xargs -P 2 gzip
> The FSF take the view that there is one definition of Free: It's their way or the highway. Canonical don't conform to this definition of Free, instead they have something different, that probably works better for them.

The FSF have a Free Software Definition; similarly the OSF have an Open Source Definition. This is good, because it means that when someone says "free software" or "open source", we can all agree on what these terms mean.
Hey all, I'm glad to see this has attracted some attention. I originally made it for myself to get an overview of all the startups in one place. I couldn't find an official list and the spreadsheet I linked was the best I could find, but I can't even sort it.

The data is pulled from the spreadsheet, but unfortunately it's not all accurate. The estimated aquisition price is estimated by the author of the original spreadsheet. Also, a number of domains are defunct, but the startups aren't listed as dead or exited. And as pg points out, some names are also wrong.

There are several other bugs I'm aware of too. I just wanted to get something functional out to see if anyone was actually interested. I'll fix things up and add more features when I have time (who the acquirer was, link to a press release).

I was thinking of making this into an open wiki, as there's no one reliable source to pull data from. It'd also be much easier to maintain.

Thanks for the feedback, everyone!
MicroSoft wasn't exercising control over what you did with your Windows 3.1 there, they were just being a (anti-competitive) dick about what you ran it on. Having a controlled environment in this context is, controlling what can run in the environment that you provide, rather than controlling what environment the stuff you provide can run it.
> Node.js (which admittedly I've never used) would appear to be available only on a tiny minority of machines you would encounter "in the wild".

Given that it really only hit the public consciousness last November or so, that's more or less expected. What makes people so bullish is that the number of JS developers isn't going to decrease any time soon.

It is, however, a pretty awful shell scripting environment and I don't know who would prefer it to Ruby. I say this despite writing a build system for it this weekend to drop dependencies on Ruby and Java. Coffeescript improves things but it's still pretty raw.
'think about taxation of your business, think about where the humans are'. What a succinct way to put it.
Yipit. All the best daily deals, coupons and discounts.
Surely there's room to redefine the 'pure' definition of monopoly to include relative hegemony. No? Well that's how it's being used.
Yeah it was a dead loss to me. Even my 13 year old daughter is having second thoughts. (She is also turning in her iPhone for a Blackberry, which may or may not be a data point of interest to the smartphone manufacturers).

Twitter on the other hand has made me new friends in faraway places. Last time I was in Singapore I announced my arrival and a guy volunteered to give me the 2 hour tour. I've gone to cigar clubs in Riyadh and had a multip-person meetup in a Starbucks in a shopping mall in Dubai.

It's those human connections that make Twitter great for me.

If you're ever in Pasadena, CA -- @philiphodgen :-)

EDIT: I will be in San Francisco chairing the California Society of CPA's International Tax and Business Conference on December 7, 2010. I'll be flying up on Sunday, December 5. If you're interested in getting together for (geez I can't believe I'm saying this) free tax brainstorming shoot me an email at philiphodgen@gmail.com.
even though i don't personally agree with the chancellors optionion, i find it great that we finally have reached a point where such issues can be discussed openly. And I am still suprised on that quote...
... Normally, everyone is just to frightened to be proud of his country or say out loud his true position because of the past we have.
Strongly agree. One of these days I want to write a manifesto against "work-life balance". Yeah, you heard me: against. "Balance" implies a tradeoff. Work, when you have the right work, is life.

That's not to say there's no such thing as overwork, spending too little time with your family or what have you. But it's time someone stood up to the prophets of complacency.
If there isn't already one in a museum then this should go there.
> that it has some sort of flaw in it (like a real gimp)

I don't think that most non-native speakers have come across the sense of a 'gimp' as a cripple. I for one always thought that a gimp was some kind of rodent (probably prompted by the GIMP's mascot). The most common uses of the word "gimp" in Internet-visible English seem to be (i) in reference to The GIMP and (ii) to the "gimp thread", which seems to have something to do with sewing machines.

> "Adobe made Flash, so Photoshop must be better."
Well, they made enough money from Photoshop to be able to buy Macromedia. Close enough :-)
Likewise. I've never been good at staying up late, but I wake up at 4am everyday for about 3 hours of uninterrupted work time.
3 things I miss in google analytics:
- a way to create events from the server side (like mixpanel)
- a way to set events as steps in funnels
- heatmaps
It's probably helpful to think of coroutines as first-class functions with independent call stacks, which can be suspended and resumed (potentially returning and passing in new arguments). Coroutines are also usable as (one-shot) continuations, and continuations can be used to implement coroutines.

There's a great paper about coroutines ("Revisiting Coroutines", http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.58.4...) co-written by one of the primary Lua authors.

FWIW, you can also stream Lua functions (with string.dump), though it takes a bit of extra trouble to stream functions with nonlocal values ("upvalues"/closures). I don't know if it's possible to stream Lua coroutines, though. As with most things, Erlang's immutability makes streaming them much easier.
Ask HN: What's the story of Airbnb?
On this year's Startup School, Airbnb was allegedly mentioned as an example of a company that overcame adversity and is now enjoying rewards for sticking around and trying hard enough.

Like many of you out there, I'm hard at work on bringing my own product to the market, but the environment isn't particularly supportive. Over the past few months I've found various motivating anecdotes and stories on HN. Thank you for that.

So my questions are:

* What did Airbnb have to put up with and what's the situation today?

* Do you have personal experience to share about building something beautiful, bound to be an extraordinary product/service, but temporarily on the verge of breakdown?

Thanks.
What the F*ck are You Doing?
7 Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs
Ask HN: To my surprise, a popular submission killed ...
I'd be interested in any insights as to why this poll got killed:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1801073

It seemed to be of relevance to hacker culture, and judging by the number of votes, I wasn't the only one to think so.

Yet clearly there were enough people who found it inappropriate to flag it and get it killed. I'd be interested in learning more about why.

Thanks.
> The FSF take the view that there is one definition of Free: It's their way or the highway.

No. The FSF takes the view that there is one definition of Free Software. Considering it's a concept invented by its creator and one the FSF was specifically created to defend, I don't see how they could be wrong.

> On the one hand the FSF see themselves as guardians of the Free Software Movement

Because they are, that's very specifically what the FSF was created for.
>zoom: 1 wtf is that?

Not sure if that's incredulity or a genuine question - it forces (the internal, once hidden, secret) hasLayout flag to be set in MSIE browsers but does nothing else (visually) and is ignored by other browsers. Unfortunately it's not a standard attribute and so compliance checks fail.
Er,

"You are following convection, a rat race."
__________________^^^^^^^^^^____________

Is this supposed to be "convention"? Either way, it doesn't make much sense as stated, although I guess I can gestalt what it might mean.
Would anybody know how to download them? (apart from 1x recording)
I'd like to listen/view them while I'm in the subway, as they are pretty long.
I have, and I am. If I write some code, and Microsoft takes it and improves Windows, I've just helped a zillion people, regardless of how much I dislike Microsoft, and regardless of the fact that I won't see a dime or any credit.

I do think the opposing position has merit, I just don't take the same position personally.
This also gets into a whole debate of gender issues. For example in matters of HR, nobody is qualified to judge someone's gender. If this same logic was extended to bartenders and bouncers then "ladies' nights" would not be able to exist. Then again, in this case it seems that the state of the system is a steady state: (heterosexual) men are happy that women are at bars, women are happy to get cheap/free drinks and bar owners are happy to make money.
I look forward to his next post, "Why I love bits."
The Long Stick Startup
I'm glad you're taking this in good humor. As it happens, I'm ok with the possibility that the essay does not completely capture everything that keeps the movement from greatness, and that the community may only be paranoid sporadically, but I'm keenly interested in what sort of facts could support the notion that "A and not A" might be true for some value of A.
I have used Zone Edit for years and years.....http://zoneedit.com/

Reliable, very fast and you have a lot of flexibility.
I wonder what the actual split is. What is the number of front page stories contributed by the top X users on HN?
PCWorld: "In other words: Stay in School"

Actually, I believe it's: "Stay hungry, stay foolish"
This is extremely frustrating. I've seen this exact response on a number of tech sites. The people who are supposed to be the most informed proponents of net neutrality don't even understand the basic concept.
I actually agree with the main point. In every one of the examples, however, the person who spoke isn't thinking about communication, but about himself.

"Water no cold!" may result in snickers amongst the wait staff, and they may not even understand. "Water, no ice please" is certainly more respectful and appropriate. Simply saying "confirmed" is easier for your agent, but it may insult the recipient by being so terse.

Use good grammar with acquaintances to show respect and professionalism. Use your own style with people who know you well to show your personality.
To ship it, yes, but there's the compiler, too. With F#, if your organization uses the latest Visual Studio, you're good; but if your shop uses a typical Java IDE setup, anyone who wants to build your project has to do extra work beyond the standard environment (e.g. installing Clojure's Eclipse or NetBeans plugins, with extra fun if you depend on Clojure libs that use Leiningen).
VbV and MCSC are terrible. They take everything banks tell consumers not to do (don't enter your password on unfamiliar sites, check that the URL in the address bar matches the site you think you're on, don't give out your social security number to unfamiliar sites) and then make you do it all to complete a simple purchase. You get redirected to a 3rd party site, with a 1998-era design, have to enter your social security number and credit card details, etc.

I honestly believe ecommerce would be in a better place if all payments had to go through a PayPal-like company. Rather than a million individual site owners ticking off boxes saying they know something about payment security without actually complying with PCIDSS, consumers would register with a smaller number of well-known payment providers and use them to checkout without ever typing payment information into individual stores' sites.

Really, the card brands could launch a PayPal alternative of their own.
The issue for me isn't so much about working till late at night, but the fact that I cannot wake up in time for my engagements for the next day.

Anyone solved that problem?
Glad to hear you have that perspective. Especially with project work, keeping clients happy so they come back to you for the next project is key. Maybe you should've managed that apartment complex!
Delaware has the Delaware Court of Chancery (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delaware_Court_of_Chancery), which is where most business-related issues are heard in the state. It's got a long and established record of well-understood precedents, professional management, and no juries. This make is much easier for corporate lawyers to figure out how a case will go, and then react accordingly.

It's slightly favorable tax-wise (it's got a relatively simple code) and had a high cap on interest (which banks can no longer export, IIRC) - but mostly it's the judicial system that makes it popular.
I moved to Linode recently from vps.net, nothing major just a few personal sites, but so far Linode have been great. If you're ever tempted to, don't go with vps.net.
It took 69 single steps to get past a BOOST_FOREACH() statement. Madness.
As he often does, John Carmack gives a brief and powerful argument. While I still have a love for C++, just because library developers can do something with enough preprocessor and templates, doesn't mean they should.
I'm not being sarcastic. I'm a libertarian (i.e. classical liberal). I think people should have freedom to do things that don't hurt others.

It's only legitimate to stop people drinking when there's some danger involved, e.g. drinking with driving. One can argue for other cases like drinking heavily with a "mean drunk" personality type, or drinking heavily without the experience/knowledge to be safe in that situation. Drinking with being aged 20 isn't inherently dangerous. And it's a bad (both inaccurate and ageist) proxy for the other things that actually matter.
I went to your site, read the FAQ and then registered to test it but was told I needed to download Firefox. I am using the latest Beta build of Chrome.

My only suggestions at this point are to highlight browser requirements before someone takes the time to register; even though the registration form is short.

Secondly, do we really have to use Firefox?
If I'm a Canadian who lives outside of america but wants to have an office in the bay area so I can hire local bay area people and have people be close to the area for meetings and what not. The head office isn't in america and the bay area office just pays developers to make software and hold business meetings. I and other staff possibly are in the head office in singapore, labuan, panama or wherever else. Will there US be taxation of the corporations profits then?
You should have a video walk-through on the site for people who don't want to register now or whose browsers aren't supported (I got an error on Android).