skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
TBH, I was amazed they didn't pull the plug sooner, considering all the negativity surrounding paypal. I haven't had any issues with paypal myself, but reading all the stories from other people having issues with them... I don't know, I would really REALLY like to have an alternative somewhere, but sadly there isn't one.
When people say their bootstrapped business was profitable from day one, they're usually not getting paid any kind of salary from it.

When I started Lighthouse, we were "profitable" right away because of a few strategic deals. Our only monthly bill was to our CC gateway. At the time, my partner and I were both consulting to make ends meet. Essentially, we were working our asses off on two jobs and only getting one real paycheck out of it. I think it was about a year before Lighthouse could sustain us both.
Absolutely! Reminds me of The Social Network when Shawn Fanning tells that girl he's an entrepreneur and she replies, "So you're unemployed."

Semantics, but I think she's right. You're not an entrepreneur until you've done something. A good reminder, very The War of Art-esque (a book I highly recommend).
They must have changed the prize distribution procedure for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. I was on the show in 2000. They gave us a big speech about how if you win a big prize, they will literally cut you a check for that amount and you should talk to a tax advisor before spending anything. One of their early winners got into some tax trouble. I didn't win anything on the show, but they sent me a check for $400 in January to cover my taxes on the plane tickets and hotel.
Where exactly will that money go??
entremanures? was that on purpose?
It has rarely been my experience that energy invested into defending the purity of definitions has ROI as good as energy invested into customer acquisition (for either party).
Delorean Hard Drive - The Ultimate Time Machine Disk?
yeah, i sent jenna and evelyn a private note about tumblr

they really got that one wrong
Ahh, I thought I had gotten rid of most of the errors. I'll definitely look into that.

As far as more security, can you elaborate? I added the confirmation email part when you first sign up as one sort of security measure that may stop some spammers. I've thought a lot about security, but I'm not sure how best to implement it or what to all watch for.

As for as database queries go, I've done the work required to check for XSS and MySQL injection and what not.
Computer identifies the most boring day in history
As usual, probably collecting interest for paypal. I made a formal complaint demanding it back. If they don't reply timely I'm deleting my account.
How to Use Discounts Properly | Noobpreneur Business Blog
s/EasyDNS/EveryDNS/

Please don't confuse the two because of shoddy reporting! EasyDNS is being dragged through the mud unfairly...
Don't get addicted to Brain Crack: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24prm3XjVgk
Pyramid Podcast, a Pylons Project, with Ben Bangert and Chris McDonough
It doesn't, and am against sorting people into A, B etc buckets at all. Nor am a big fan of interview puzzles in principle. Looking at how my grandparent post sunk though, seems like an opposite came across to a number of people.

Good luck to you with job search.
I've been talking with friends about founding a company and we disagree on which direction to go.

I'm going to use this chart to figure out where we each stand and how close/far from each other we are. It looks like it'll be great for that.
Visual tour: 25 years of Windows
You can start learning how to code, not for this startup but the one after this one. Also having a cofounder helps a lot, it validates your idea first of all.

Maybe, instead of asking us "How do I keep my company / money to myself", you should ask yourself "Do I want all of something that is unvaluable or a part of something invaluable?"
It reads like it was written by a young, naive child...like a "No Girls Allowed" sign on a tree house.
Also, change your facebook icon to support Wikileaks! /s
You could say the same about writing in online fora commenting on such energy investments ;)

And yet, here we are.

I think that people that care about definitions are free to do as they please and don't need to see everything and anything in terms of ROI or customers acquired.

If that were the case HN would be terribly quiet. (But maybe the SNR would get better!).
Yes, I agree. That's why I think we should do better. Dreamweaver really doesn't come close to what we should be doing in terms of visual and coding tools to let designers and developers work together.
All of the fields you mentioned get by mostly with modes of mathematic proof introduced by Greeks. In that sense there wasn't much new since Pythagoras until the infamous proof of map coloring theorem recently.
> entremanures

That's a gem :)
Yeah, the title is misleading because really the problem described in the blog post is to store some unknown number of ints between 1 and 10,000. The better solution than a straight bitmap of 10,000 bits is to use all 4KB and devote three bits to each slot. Then you can remember up to 7 occurrences of each integer.

There's no need for bloom filters here because you can already cover all the possibilities using a bitmap.
Cartoon Characters Pictures
Cartoon is not separated from the world of children. Talking about cartoons makes us remember our childhood.
Cartoon Characters Pictures
Cartoon,Characters,Pictures
Nitpicking: Sean Parker. Fanning was the other Napster guy.
Issue resolved: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4353939/how-to-write-an-i...
I closed my Amazon account too.
Inside the Google News algorithm
There is a unix command for that :

tr ‘’“” \'\'\"\" | sh
The Faculty Sabbatical on the Chopping Block
I wonder how long it will be until we see gpus used for general purposes on the server- like accelerating apache or mysql. Since this hasn't been done yet, there must be some reason it's not possible?
Usually, PayPal is "evil" because of false positives on fraud. They'd know that an account for an organization like WikiLeaks is legit.

There is a YC-company alternative: https://www.wepay.com/
too much onion?

http://www.theonion.com/articles/good-old-days-traced-back-t...
If I had 17 accounts they would all be giving you karma.
WebObjects was $50,000 when it was expected to be $50,000. It was running on bigger servers (HP. Sun) when the software on those boxes was very expensive. They dropped the price pretty significantly later when they were bought by Apple.
It's interesting that in North America it was an intentional decision to make land and mobile #'s indistinguishable, yet we are now supposed to keep track. I'm probably a bit sloppy with my contact list, but still people forward calls to their mobiles or transfer numbers. I've definitely sent SMS messages to the wrong place before - also because people change their mobile numbers frequently.
Yeah, I make that mistake a lot. I've only been here a decade and old habits are hard to break.
I think this is better-phrased as a general principle: unless someone has been tried and convicted for a crime, and thus restricted in some way from using your service (put in jail with no Internet access, given restrictions to not use computers, etc.) then it's not your job to decide whether or not they can use your service, because that presumes them guilty. It doesn't matter if they're a "terrorist" or a "pedophile" or a "communist loonie": if they had actually done something wrong, the government would already be making sure they can't make use your service. For everyone except the criminal-justice system, a user should just be a user: no "is a criminal" bit required.
Amazon is much harder for me to move away from than PayPal. with PayPal, I just transfer my money out and click the cancel button.

With Amazon, I have to re-do my entire deployment setup, since Heroku has made it so freaking easy. Not to mention migrate all of my addon accounts too... significantly more complicated.

I'll still do it, it just won't happen today.
CodeKata - Katas for improving programming skills.
I ask these questions three:

1) What good or service do you provide?

2) Who buys it?

3) What impact does it have on society? (entrepreneurs have real impact on society, from cleaning carpets to creating computers)
You must raise outside capital to be considered an entrepreneur, bootstrapping be damned?

We employ a couple dozen people and never took a VC round. Looks like I've been living a lie. :(

At the very least, she could have suggested an alternate term for people who don't meet every point on her arbitrary checklist.
Quora Censors Are Stalking Me Yikes
Hiring for Happiness
in that small of a team i would say focus on one to two day sprints with releases to production at the end of day two.

unit testing is NOT agile (it's extrememe programming) but you should still do it.

be sure to continually evaluate whether what your doing makes sense, if it doesn't drop it/change it.
Porsches are gauche. There's some lunatic who parks his DB9 on the street (3rd & King, if you're interested), which is a statement of utter contempt for us proles. "I don't mind parking my quarter-million dollar car at a meter because I have four more just like it at home".
What people fail to recognize is that inside the .com bubble was a solid pot of gold. Internet companies did change the world and became exceptionally profitable. The facts just got lost in the hysteria.

Is Groupon a bubble? Sure. Is there a pot of gold inside of it? You bet.
Maybe the user has an Internet provider with one of those stupid policy where TCP port 80 is closed as inbound. And he used a TCP high port to be able to host his/her HTTP server.
Mine was but we lined up customers before really building our product. Customers are coming to us now after our initial customers have been singing our praises. Our customers love us so far and want to see us succeed. That part is awesome. I have no idea where it will go but I feel like if we delight our customers we'll do fine.
"Today, Groupon did something that all entrepreneurs, in their heart of the hearts, wishes they could do: spur the big acquisition offer and swing for the fences."

6B isn't a home run these days?
Don't stop the support once it's no longer frontpage news.

As for details... I'm wondering myself. I feel too much like a slacktivist so far.
Their main goal is in disseminating information. The front page is just the wrapping paper. If you want to further their goals, seed their torrents.
if they had actually done something *illegal*, the government would already be making sure they can't make use your service.

FTFY

They could do something wrong without it being illegal, and a government can't act against them until they do something actually illegal. If I think that their activities are wrong, I shouldn't have to suffer them to use my services to continue those activities. I have a right to my freedom of consience.
Why, exactly, is the square root of 2 not a rational?
Social Networking: The Present
There are certainly lots of opportunities to make money on the Internet, though, only few do get it.

The point is to find out a niche and value your market, predict if it's going to make a ROI or not. Then work on it. You may need programming skills, you may not (copywriting, design, affiliate marketing...). However, the more skills you have the better, and the cheaper you'll bootstrap your business.

Persist. It won't be that easy and you may have to wait for months to get results.

And yes, this is really an amazing thing, to make money from the Internet, regardless of your location, language, country or education level. You are your own boss, you enjoy freedom and also an unlimited potential of income.
Really weird scrolling on Safari 5.0.3 on snow leopard. The background flickers through the search results. Otherwise really cool.
It is not about owing anything to the people of India. It is about owing himself the pleasure and satisfaction of making his homeland - the place where he was born and the place where he grew up - a better place.
Netflix is using Level3 as their CDN to stream movie - http://www.thestreet.com/story/10916915/level-3-surges-on-ne...
re: patio11 - while he met one of her negative criteria (working for someone else) - he met the other positive ones - had a product he was selling. I'd suggest that meeting the positive criteria can generally outweigh some of the negative ones. The difference would be working for someone else, coming home, spending a lot of evenings on a web-app, and saying you're an entrepreneur. In the web-app space, I wouldn't consider someone an entrepreneur who had no working web-app, or had one with no paying customers and/or revenue stream.
What is the utility of HTML5 and CSS3 in web designing?
The word is ill-defined...it basically boils down to "one who assumes risk for starting a new venture". Not much more to it than that. My view is that TONS of people are entrepreneurs even if I don't care to read about them. They're still people taking risk to try and start something up, and I'll give most anybody props for that...especially if they're planning and working hard, but that's not an absolute requirement.
They'd still eat paste on the Discovery for two reasons:

1) There might be a power or mechanical failure that prevents the ring section from turning, and you don't want to be stuck years from Earth with most of your food supply inedible in zero-G.

2) "Caviar is cheaper than Cornflakes in space." The paste food would have a much higher nutrition-to-weight ratio. A Hungry-Man dinner wouldn't be able to justify the fuel cost to put it into Earth orbit, let alone a mission to Jupiter.

Also, triggering the explosive bolts on the Pod probably should be easier than using a Zero-G toilet; you wouldn't care where the debris from the bolts end up.
Evidently you are not familiar with how many Lisp compilers work. You don't need an interpreter anywhere, just a compiler.

Note that eval(), as much as it makes sense in the C language, can be implemented in C too (inject the text into a stub, compile it into a shared library, dlopen(), dlsym(), call it).
<fx: blush> Gosh. Thank you.
What label to slap on my forehead certainly is the least of my problems.
My bio used to read: Entrepreneur (aka. Unemployed)
What laws, in particular, did you have in mind? Wikileaks has not, to the best of my knowledge, been charged with any violation of law in the United States (or anywhere else, for that matter).
I find Jolie's black and white outlook on the word disheartening and a window into the way she views the world. Moreover, this stuff is two months old, why are we relinking it to HN?

Plus, if you aren't an entrepreneur yourself, where are the qualifications to label others? I just am not on board with this article
You can support the release of information, and wikileaks, by seeding their torrents: http://thepiratebay.org/search/wikileaks/0/99/0

Or you can be a public backup; mirror the wikileaks site like the dutch "schock blog" Geenstijl did: http://mirror.geenstijl.nl/20101203-wikileaks/213.251.145.96...
Comedy isn't pretty! - Steve Martin

A rich man's joke is always funny. - Thomas Edward Brown

It's funny 'cause it's true. - Homer Simpson

You can have one, maybe two, but you rarely get all three.
At the end of the day, you still have to:

1) Make/sell a good product or service at a reasonable price

Or

2) Be really, really good at convincing/tricking people into paying for your product/service

If you do both 1 and 2 well, you're going to do well. Just one, and you'll be okay. If you're just mediocre at both, then good luck. Competition is fierce in the basic product/service sectors on the Internet now that the barrier of entry for anyone setting up an Internet business is so low.
>PayPal, Amazon, et. al. Have not broken the law by providing services to Wikileaks

I would be surprised if it's not illegal to aid in the dissemination of classified material. Nevertheless, its certainly illegal to aid an abet terrorists. Seeing as the government owns the monopoly on defining who is a terrorist, it's not a stretch at all to see there might be actual legal consequences down the road for these companies.

This may not be "right", but this isn't Amazon's or Paypal's fight to have. I don't blame them one bit. This is Wikileak's problem to deal with--It comes with the territory.
Facebook wouldn't be called a startup or Mark Zuckerburg an entrepreneur in the early days, no real funding, all at college, no business model.
I think so:

After playing this game for a decade and a half, including a lot of work on bad codebases, by the early '90s I developed a set of quickly discernible and amazingly reliable metrics that could help me judge the quality of random code. Trailing whitespace was a really good metric of sloppy coding, at least in the '80s and '90s. The fact that it confuses SCM systems is just another reason to be this sort of meticulous with your code's text and to e.g. select for programmers who are that sort of careful.
The exact same model. This is textbook. In practice? There's going to be differences. The exact same database does not mean the exact same model.

Controllers? Night and day. A complete re-write would be necessary. The app will function entirely different.

Generic strawman? Chill, this isn't slashdot. But to say that the only thing stopping this awesome revolution in software development is that Web Objects wasn't successful seems to me to ignore the grim realities of most software development projects: There isn't the ability, talent, budget or planning to produce truly reusable code.
Isn't this just content_for/yield(:sym)? Or are you talking about something else?
http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/Captur...
Tyler thanks a lot for submitting this! A bit of background: I've written this for my Human Resources class at UCSB and as a way to think about how I want to grow my new company, Happy.

http://www.thisishappy.com
Wait, at what point did releasing classified information, treason, become something worth supporting?

Edit: I love it. Downvoted. Information is classified for many reasons. Some of which are because some information may help the US's enemies. That is treason.

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.

You only know now that the information released was not of high caliber. You only know that after 1 man decided to release these documents. If this 1 man decides to continue to release information, one day he may release something more substantial that could actually harm the US.

You downvote me for what? Because you don't agree that it's treason? Or you simply support someone releasing classified information. You don't get to break the law and then later claim that it's not that bad. He broke. the. law.
Replied to your illinois account - didn't want to turn this in to a bug report area. :)
That was my most favorite part as well, and what made me want to post this to HN.

Loves this last paragraph especially: "Unfortunately, that's too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have."

Big point to take away from that is you can't make great consumer products unless you have a good understanding of people and human nature.

Guys like Markus Frind, Jonah Peretti, and esp Zuckerberg are great examples of good hackers who also have that rare quality of knowing what makes people tick.

No surprise that broad thinkers are able to connect the dots better. Makes me think of awesome writers in HN like PG and Derek Sivers who continually write quality posts and insights.
Whatever be the thought creeping into my mind after reading this post, it is indeed a REALITY CHECK

I want to ignore rest of the post and just read this -
"I’ve worked for entrepreneurs quite a bit over the past 12 years. They’re hustlers, jugglers, madmen, egomaniacs, people who desperately attempt to build empires on little money and less time"
I'm not sure you can change the question just because there is no answer :P

4KB of RAM is not the same as an O(1) memory requirement, since we have already restricted the number and range of integers to 10000 (i.e. constants),so there is nothing left to vary. The page size just presents a target ratio for compression, not an asymptotic restriction on memory usage.
The independent ‘life’ of a text – a musing on HN and memes
holat1 at illinois dot edu? I haven't gotten any emails yet. I appreciate the discrete bug reporting, though haha
Great question -- and great suggestions elsewhere in the thread.

One very useful thing to do is boycott Amazon over this, and ask your friends and family to do so as well. It's easy enough:

- buy books and DVDs elsewhere this holiday season
- ask any friends and family not to buy via Amazon
- post about it on your Facebook (and your blog if you have one)

Amazon made a business decision not to stand up for free speech. If they take a beating as a result, other companies will think twice before doing the same.
Goggle made a lot more than that, so while the price is high, even for the Valley, it is not unheard of.
When I heard that I ran a quick EV% calculation and thought ... whaaa?
Wikileaks activists and whistleblowers rely on Tor. Assange has publicly stated that by running a Tor relay you can help the backbone infrastructure.
Wikileaks would not exist without Tor.

http://www.torproject.org/

http://www.torservers.net/

If you are a coder, donate your time and help with development (irc.oftc.net, #tor)
I donated and have written Paypal to ask for clarification on why the account was closed and what their policy is for returning the money or seeing it through to the intended recipient, etc.

Hopefully others who donated will do this as well so that there are at least some customer service costs associated with this. As you mention, there doesn't seem to be much if any illegality about the activities that I can spot, and fair use for political speech covers the rest.
Does it really matter?

I know a guy who brings in tens of thousands of dollars with his web business. He's not an entrepreneur by your definition. I think he's fine with it.

Reminds of the lyrics by Big Punisher, "I'm not a player I just f a lot"
So, I'm sorry I don't mean to be a Debbie Downer here but basically his 'system' is; make a big long list, scan that list for things you want to do, ignore the things you don't want to do, do the thing(s) you 'feel' like doing and, when completed, draw a line through the thing you just did.

That qualifies as a 'system'?
Time Management with Mark Forster’s Autofocus System
Also consider those who won't be savvy enough to look to torrents but still need the info. Mirror the sites and distribute the links across social networks. Consider sharing with the UK, FR, ES, DE & US journalists who had a preview of the cables prior to going public. They may be able to disseminate to interested general public more efficiently.
They also get to collect the rent from these firms instead of paying rent for their current and future space to the old landlord, which will make the financial part better that "Google pays 1.9 billion for dumpy building!" sounds.