skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good points, you know my one issue with the whole libertarian bit is that it's not really cohesive.

I mean to say, why should I, a humble peasant be forced to subsidize the enforcement of their property rights?
they would talk about how they'd drive down to Yale and scream "Harvard, Harvard!" and it was then, I realized, how little I had in common with these grads.

that in itself isn't necessarily a sign of 'ivy league' elitism ... it might just be school spirit, like what college students in sports-focused colleges do when there are games against rival colleges.
Let's make a deal, you guys refrain from pop-psychoanalyzing those of us with libertarian leanings and I won't submit right-wing essays that diagnose socialists with megalomania and delusions of grandeur.

Impugning your opponent's motivations is the lowest form of rhetoric.
email sent. we'll have a chat and see if I can't help you out a bit :)
is the startup interesting? having a "project of your own" might be nice, but it won't comfort you if that project ends up being a turd.
Number one would be my choice unless I had some reason (ie family) that necessitates going for the more "practical" second option. Assuming you're a youngish bachelor that can comfortably get by on the lower salary / benefits, the startup sounds like a great match.

Jobs take up a lot of your time - do your best to find one that you can enjoy. If the point of money is to buy happiness (even though you supposedly can't), what's wrong with "spending" some money and benefits to make 40 hours a week more fun?
Find here 401k QDRO Instructions and Model qdro form
QDRONOW is experienced in preparing Qualified Domestic relations order's(QDRO).This firm Specializing in the preparation of retirement/pension divisons through a divorce. for Details Visit our Website qdronow.com/
So I don't really know how this would work, but isn't this whole approach predicated on the idea that US corporate tax rates are higher than Portugal corporate tax rates (which on the face of it seems unlikely)? If the opposite is the case, and it's advantageous to the business to build up a US presence, wouldn't it be better to have as much income as possible taxed as US corporate income, and repatriate as little as possible to Portugal?
The startup seems interesting by far. They seem to have a cool custom-made system in place, but it won't be under my jurisdiction.
Im not sure of the rates but my cofounder used to send a decent amount of traffic to ebay through the affiliate system, I actually wrote a fairly complex system in which live auctions were compared to other retailers prices.

At some point though the affiliate commission rates went from worth pursuing to not really worth it at all even though we had invested a fair amount of effort in integrating ebay.
Validation in Dijkstra's shunting yard algorithm
I think that the nice thing about BDD is that it reduces the gap between requirement gathering tools (use cases/scenarios, to be specific) and user acceptance or integration testing.

But it doesn't banish the problems of inconsistent or incomplete requirements. And it doesn't drive away solution complexity exlosion as you descend into the code. And it certainly isn't as useful for diagnostic debugging on changes to the code.

But it's in the user's language (-ish), so it's more likely to be funded and supported. That can only be a good thing.
As somebody who runs a small non-software related online business, selling products, my first question is - why in the world do you need funding?

Just start a website selling the stands and see how many orders you get! You can obviously build a few with your existing crappy tools. Rather than going through all the trouble and distraction of raising money, when you are not even sure if there is much of a market there - just start selling and find out! You will soon know if this is something worth perusing, and you can use the income generated to buy better tools and scale up the business.

In the unlikely event that you start to become flooded with orders you can either create some kind of waiting list people can add their e-mail addresses to, or just increase your prices until you have a level of demand you can deal with.

To pull some advice from the software related start-up work, If you are not embarrassed by version 1, then you have waited to long to release.
Today I learned that FYIFV = Fuck You, I'm Fully Vested.
I lived in Beaverton (very close to Portland) many years ago. I highly recommend the Gorge (Multnomah fall in particular), Crater Lake, and Cannon Beach.
I'm in, it would be great to meet all the talents out there in Melbourne. :)
Looks like you're new to HN.

xkcd is never obligatory.
I assume they mean packaged ramen, which is extra-confusing because the described study was done in Australia, where nobody calls those "ramen" at all. They're called "two-minute noodles".
Beach umbrella | Market umbrella
Shadeusa Umbrellas has a variety of Beach umbrella and selected for its design, workmanship, durability and, of course, portability. We also offer the internet's largest selection of Patio umbrellas.
I don't have a family. No bills to pay (besides my car), no rent whatsoever (still live with my parents), and completely debt-free. I'm just wondering if this startup will open a few doors in the future and get me a better job / good experience.

But yeah, I'm sort of agreeing with you at this moment, but maybe there are others who have an opposite point of view.
Completely anecdotal (not data) point: guy I know from one forum, young guy in his 20s, lived on ramen noodles for 18 months to 2 years. Got colon cancer, which usually hits people who are older.

(I am trying to learn enough good recipes to eat well at home instead of eating out, have bought a few decent cookbooks and surprisingly, have found it enjoyable though time consuming to cook from scratch.)
@arn, I agree and you give a lovely example of parents wanting to have children and point to an even lovelier set of cartoons - they totally cracked me up - thank you!!:)
It's odd to know Ferrett from the Magic community and then see his link on the tech related site.

While very well written and an enjoyable read, my problem with his opinion and the people who think Libertarians = Anarcho-capitalists is that they take it to the complete extreme. Democrats aren't Socialists, etc. My #1 desire with Libertarianism is for a smaller government, not a destroyed government.
Wow, thanks for taking me back to my youth:

> Bentley. Everett. Miss Logan's going to have dinner with us.

> Whip up a liver and whey shake.

--Warren Beatty in "Heaven Can Wait"

[ best dietary advice this vegetarian ever got about how to prepare for the Super Bowl ]
The big difference between IBM and Microsoft is that IBM also makes hardware along with software. Microsoft currently does not make much hardware and holds very few patents in that area. This is a big concern. I think in a few years we'll see a Microsoft made phone, and maybe even sooner if innovation continues at the current pace.
One more data point: My brother eats Ramen pretty much every day and has for the last 2-3 years (he's in college now). He hasn't been to the doctor in at least 5 years even for a physical. However, he eats the Ramen without cooking it and just putting the spices or flavoring on it and then crunching through it. To be honest, it makes me sick watching it, so maybe that counts?
Chances are, your contract probably stipulates that any work or ideas you come up with whilst being an employee are their property.
If that's the case, ask your friend or a family member to approach them for you.
Oh, I see. Yeah, I realized that was the issue, but I didn't know which version I needed, either, or if it was something I was doing wrong.

I assume Zed doesn't maintain this actively anymore? The fact that it doesn't work out-of-the-box suggests so, at least.
You need to figure out what is important to you right now. How much does the money mean to you? Do you need to have higher, more stable income? Can you live with a slightly lower income for a couple of years? Are the benefits a deal-breaker? Obviously getting experience is your priority and it sounds like both will give you that (though it sounds like company 1 will give you more of the experience you are after).

One thing you didn't mention with the two companies is possibility for promotion. If you don't know I'd recommend talking to each company about room for growth and opportunities to take on different roles.
Can I also suggest that we all wear white t-shirt or something that we can easily identify each other rather than blindly walk up to anyone in the bar IMO?
OpenKeyval.org, a free data store/social experiment
Howdy, HN'ers;
A few weeks ago, we had an idea for a fun side project: a sorta-Memcache-like data storage system that could be trivially used for building simple web apps. After a few evenings of hacking, @dustball and I are pleased to present OpenKeyval.

OpenKeyval is a completely open key-value data store, exposed as a drop-dead simple web service. The goal is to make this a very easy way to persist data in web applications.

http://openkeyval.org/

As a data storage system, it's pretty basic: you can store any data you want under a particular key, and then fetch it later. You can also serve it back with a particular MIME type, so it can be used to serve small resources. The keyword small is operative here: the data is limited to 64 KiB, which is plenty of space for storing interesting data, but not really big enough for storing images or any other sort of media.

As a social experiment, I think it's sort of fun: there's no authentication of any kind -- just come up with sufficiently unique keys to make it unlikely that anyone else will stumble upon them. Scouts honour that anything you put here is safe in our hands.

I'm curious as to what people think this might be useful for, and if you have any feature requests. I'd love to see people try to build something with it -- but go easy on us, since it's just an experiment. :)
Techshop isn't strong for wood. However, there's Sawdust in Santa Clara.

http://www.sawdustshop.com/
It creates an industry of private businesses that have but one motive: a profit motive.

They are therefor motivated to do everything they can to increase incarceration rates to create demand for their services of imprisonment. This article illustrates that pretty clearly. It also creates situations like the corrupt judge/private prison kickback scheme in Pennsylvania recently.(1)

We don't need profit-driven companies who profit from increased rates of incarceration, they have no reason to really rehabilitate people - they want them back in the system ASAP.

(1) http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13judge.html?_r=2&h...
I'm heading to the gym right now
That's really disgusting. Does he at least eat some veggies?
This is kind of the nature of the beast with being an affiliate. You are being compensated for providing them traffic which converts at a substantially lower cost that their predicted lifetime revenue from the customers. If those lines cross, expect to be shown the door as soon as they're made aware of that fact. It is not economical to work with people to optimize their sites to hopefully be sending quality traffic again, since that is hard, non-obvious, might be against the interests or intentions of the site owner, and consumes resources which would be better spent optimizing the customer's own sites.

For example, a slight change in your keyword mix coming from Google -- not even a bad thing -- can make your traffic quality as measured downstream go from Great! to Abysmal! very quickly. Pretend that instead of me being both an SEO and a software developer the SEO was the affiliate of the software developer in my business.

http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/conversion-rates

I was "sending" great, great traffic with SEO, until recently. The people who joined the free trial were disposed to convert. If I had been earning 25 cents a trial, both the SEO and the software developer would be pretty happy... until October.

What happened in October? Halloween happened. And I did fairly well SEOing for Halloween, and generated a metric truckload of new trial signups and sales... but the traffic is much lower quality than someone coming in for elementary education activities. My consolidated conversion rate took a nosedive, because the conversion rate for people coming from my Halloween sites is below 1%.

If I were paying the Halloween-loving SEO 25 cent CPAs at the moment, I'd be bleeding money and probably have to cut him, since I don't have sufficient insight into his business to realize this is a temporary condition and will rectify itself in another few days (right before it happens again at Thanksgiving... and Christmas... and Valentine's Day...).
Mobile Development Toolbox: Complete Kit for Getting Started
I think (s)he's saying that human languages have composable, tree-like structures. There's nothing Lisp-specific about that, though. Prolog would work just as well, or ML (human languages may be statically typed), Joy, etc.

Also, I'm an amateur linguist at best, but the recursive structures in human languages generally don't get more than a couple levels deep - the linguistic stack seems to get smashed pretty easily.
wow, very insightful response.
Good advice. I'll probably ask them. It seems to me that both offer areas of growth, but it looks like the prospects of getting a promotion are better with the startup (assuming they don't tank).
Sleeping Mars Rover Finds Evidence of Liquid Water
Hope this works for you, but have you looked at the price of good tools? $1500 isn't going to get you much more than a nice 14" bandsaw and decent table saw.
Convenience is another factor. Unless you live adjacent to a grocery store, you are almost always nearer to a source of junk food in the form of a convenience store or fast food restaurant. Neither are likely to be cheaper than what one can make easily from generally healthful ingredients.

(Cheap comes into play e.g. with chain sit-down restaurants, who get around the problem of having mediocre food by serving it in comically huge portions slathered in some unhealthy flavorizing agent like butter or Ranch dressing. They can probably beat anything you can make at home in terms of price per calorie. The meal doesn't actually get cheaper, meanwhile the impact on your health is worse because you're buying a whole lot of calories you don't need.)

In poor communities I've seen it's sometimes the case that shopping at an actual grocery store can be a two or three hour round trip due to bus schedules while the corner store is a five minute walk.

Both also profit immensely from the wealthier car culture: fast food could not be what it is today without the drive-through window and people's eagerness to consume meals in their cars, and the typical convenience store is a convenient source of food because it also happens to sell gas, which every driver needs. Both allow the consumer to trade away money and health for immediate satiation.
Seriously. I've wanted something like this in javascript for ages. Given the complete async nature of modern javascript, it would be a huge win. On the other hand, async code in javascript (as it is now) does look cleaner than the equivalent on C#.
Essentially that's what I'm doing. If people make a donation, then I send them a product. I could continue to build them with my existing crappy tools, but with more appropriate tools I can be more efficient and maintain a more consistent, quality end product. It'd be different if I were asking for donations and promising nothing in return. In the end I think it all works out the same.

Just out of curiosity, what's you non-software online business?
It seems the post has wounded your ego, and I guess that's fair enough given it makes such sweeping generalisations (and "pop-psychoanalysis", as it were.)

However, I'd be really interested to hear your comments on some of the other points he makes, or the other threads of his argument (particularly, comparisons to history.)

(FWIW, I didn't submit the article because I whole-heartedly agree with it, I just thought it was quite well-written and interesting, and I thought it might generate some enlightening responses.)
Just a usability thought on the site...

Try this: mouse-over "TRY IT TODAY" and then try to click on "GET STARTED".

The natural instinct is to linearly move the mouse to "GET STARTED", but in doing so you trigger the "REAL-TIME INSIGHT" mouse-over action.
Royal Quest
Boy, I'm tired of the war/sports/kill-or-be-killed rhetoric. Haven't seen this at all in my business.

Sounds like a good guy to go to war with. Not the best guy to work with though.
Andina is great. Make sure to try the tuna bacon. Mmmm.
What's the easiest way to make an organization get smaller?
Writing and Selling a Blackberry App, With Numbers
Introduction to tmux (alternative to GNU screen)
I see what you're saying. I'll get the right people involved.
Costume Shops Wish Lady Gaga Wore Her Meat Dress a Little Sooner
I love Powell's. Best bookstore in the world.
I used to love a game called Stuntcopter on our family's old grayscale macintosh. You'd drop the guy out of the helicopter through the clouds into a horse-drawn hay wagon.

We also had Microleague Baseball, which I wish I could find now it would be amazing. That game was awesome, it had custom speech capability and everything. EA Sports could learn a thing or three from them.
I like it very much. Now I want to build something just to play with it.

It's awesome how much cool stuff can be accomplished when not supporting PHP4. I'd like to see more libraries taking advantage of 5.3

Have you thought of using pearhub.org for distribution?
It doesnt matter if your bank account is not in Delaware. About taxes, I think it'll be different from state to state so I can't tell you.

FYI, I bought 100,000 shares of my own company for $200 when I started. Forgot to mention this in my previous comment.
The article's title is misleading. The study doesn't actually pinpoint ramen noodles as a cause of chronic illness, but rather nutritional deficits, which of course could result from eating nothing but ramen.

"Those who relied on instant noodles and other cheap food with little nutritional content were at greater risk of chronic diseases including cancer, diabetes and heart disease, the researchers found."

The article title could just as easily have been Spaghetti May Lead... or McDonalds May Lead... Of course, it should be Poor Nutrition May Lead..., but then no one would care.
No doubt. But if I can make a decent product with shitty tools, then I can make an even better product with mediocre tools. If I start turning a real profit, then I'll invest in real quality equipment.
It hasn't wounded my ego, rather I find the article insulting. It caricatures people of my political beliefs as having nasty motivations and abundant personal failings. It reads like an op-ed in a high school Marxist newsletter and is about as balanced. I am fine with reading political articles on Hacker News but I would hope they have a little more respect for their audience.

Any Capitalist would make the rejoinder that society sucked so much in the Victorian era because society was so much poorer in aggregate. You could tax the rich at 90% and it wouldn't have stretched very far.

In the long run, the wages of labor are determined by labor productivity. Laws, unions, regulations, and other beloved institutions of the left can tinker with that ever so slightly at the margin but not by much. It is only through the accumulation of capital goods and the advancement of technology that a middle class arose. You can legislate all you want before that happens and you aren't going to do a ton of good. You can declare free unicorns for everyone but if you ain't got no unicorns then you'll leave people disappointed.

And after a capital stock is accumulated, labor becomes more productive, wages increase and life gets better of course ideologues of all stripes will claim credit for it.
Try to get all the way into W+K if you can. It's like an ad agency from a Valve game. Absolutely one of the craziest spaces I have ever been in.
check out Doctrine - http://www.doctrine-project.org/

syntas like
$peopleNamedJames = Doctrine::getTAble("Person")->findByName("James");
foreach( $peopleNamedJames as $person ){
echo $person->getAge();
}

It's very Hibernate'esqe in some regards also.
US LLCs are usually a pain in the ass for non US residents. At least, it is for Canadians and I was strongly adviced not to do that by my tax specialist. C Corp is the way to go for non residents afaik.
Outside pressure. Actually, that's the only way.
Self-employment is the dream because there are no ceilings to your growth. People have this notion of self-employment being a wonderland of hammock reading and money easily flowing in. It can be those things but it's about loving what you are doing and not trying to get free from what you are doing.

When you love what you do, a 70 hour work week is nothing - you feel purposeful and valuable. You did it because you have a dedication to a dream or a vision. One that is yours and not someone else's.
Thanks. Interesting idea. I hadn't considered distribution. Looks pretty sweet. I'll check it out.
What's wrong with anarcho-capitalists? They don't believe in chaos. They believe society would function better if laws were provided in a market and consumers had choices of law providers. They may be wrong, but the position is not a priori laughable.

Have you read "The Machinery of Freedom" by David Friedman or other pieces of anarcho-capitalist literature? If not, then what gives you the right to dismiss it so easily?
Cython is also an amazing way to write Python bindings. CPython is too heavy and complex, ctypes is too annoying and verbose to write, and Cython is a staggeringly perfect DSL for walking the line between C and Python.
I would guess he is not exaggerating in the terms you mention, but what it took to get him there. Reading "12 hours...$250 a day" sounds like he started from zero. He probably didn't.

A while back there was this post about launching a minimally viable product in 3 hours.
http://blog.amirkhella.com/2010/09/21/the-story-of-keynotopi...
3 hours and he's making money! What am I doing wrong?

Nothing. Take a look around his site. He is already an extensive expert in the field of user experience, with numerous successes under his belt. I am sure those successes were the product of a lot of education and years and years of hard work. He already has quite a following on his blog due to those successes. There was a lot that went on before he could start marketing something and sell it right off the bat.

Last summer I saw Michael Franti in concert. You may know him as the overnight success that had the song "Say Hey" if you listen to pop radio at all. (It has been in numerous TV shows, a Corona commercial, It was one of the songs played during Oprah's last show, etc.) I happen to know him as an artist who traveled from festival to festival year in and year out. Sometimes playing to a couple hundred people. Even before success, he was a world traveler, has played with indigenous people in the bush of third world countries with no electricity. He was a successful spoken word performer and has been in several bands that rose and fell long before he current lineup. I think he had released about 10 or 11 albums with various groups with virtually no mainstream success before the album that included Say Hey. At the concert I saw him at, he mentioned the press he was getting at being an overnight success and added, "yeah, with 20 years in the making."

So I guess you could say that Michael probably made hundreds of thousands of dollars for singing that 3 minute song. But there was a lot that went on in his life to get him there.
Brad Feld: How to Create a Sustainable Entrepreneurial Community