skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Milestone based. Make sure there are deliverables and that you are only shelling out equity in exchange for concrete value add.

Is she going to get you written up in X publications? On X blogs?
Is she going to be the sole driver of revenue? You can give her X% based on monthly or quarterly revenue targets.

I think the right mindset is: if she does X she will be increasing the valuation by Y so I will be comfortable giving her Z%.

Hmm wonder why I assumed they are a woman.
Maybe a few of these with a Roomba like strategy. Just walk around semi-randomly and clean as you go. Be able to identify non-cleanable surface like wall paper, etc. This would reduce the challenge to creating something that sticks to most surfaces and software plus laser/camera to identify surfaces.

I've never seen a robot that just "sticks" to everything though...
This will be huge if RIM goes all-in with this. Spending the money was the easy part – integrating the capabilities and actually using the talent to make outstanding products will be the real challenge. This will probably mean involving TAT at a much deeper level than they would have as a client, getting input at the hardware level instead of just handing the design teams a finished spec and telling them to design on top of it.
In 7th deal in seven months, Zynga acquires mobile game company Newtoy
This is a fair point. Though ultimately I doubt Groupon and Groupon-clones can expect to continue to strike the kinds of deals they have been with local businesses. So while they might see a cost saving in the vertical integrating groupon as a means of selling more adwords, I doubt the profit margins groupon currently boasts will actually improve or even persists for much longer.
Wow—now I kind of want to see what could have provoked that kind of response...

I like Steve Martin as a comedian, but he's pretty talented in other areas as well (e.g. banjo). Sounds like a lot of people missed a chance to see another side of him.
Tom Standage's "The Victorian Internet" has a lot of great detail about the culture of the telegraph operator and how it compares to the internet culture today.

"Wandering workers who went from job to job were known as 'boomers.' There were no formal job interviews; applicants were simply sat down on a busy wire to see if they could handle it. Since they could find work almost anywhere, many boomers had an itinerant lifestyle; a great number of them suffered from alcoholism or mental health disorders. In a sense, the telegraph community was a meritocracy --- it didn't matter who you were as long as you could send and receive messages quickly --- which was one of the reasons that women and children were readily admitted to the profession." p. 140

"Indeed, despite the strange customs and the often curious lifestyle of many operators, telegraphy was regarded as an attractive profession, offering the hope of rapid social advancement and fueling the expansion of the middle class. Courses, books, and pamphlets teaching Morse to beginners flourished. For the ambitious, it provided an escape route from small towns to the big cities, and for those who liked to move around, it meant guaranteed work wherever they went." p.143

Substitute some current computer language for Morse and you could definitely be talking about the present.

http://www.amazon.com/Victorian-Internet-Remarkable-Nineteen...
Two weeks ago: antimatter contained long enough to be studied.

This week: life without phosphorous.

Next week: flying skateboards?
> I managed to cobble together a functional prototype of some analytics software we needed. It was fine until

The key point is that you had something complete, it wasn't a vague idea.

In some sense, your prototype was "a product". It wasn't adequate in many ways.

I mention product because the "suits" are offering "I need someone to improve my product" terms while expecting "I need someone to build a product from my idea".

There's a huge gap between "a decent social site" and the minimal facebook, and market research and bizdev don't address that gap.
I am happily trying out protovis (renders as SVG): http://vis.stanford.edu/protovis/ex/

I am confused now about canvas: this article says a downside is redraws, but http://thejit.org uses canvas, stating that it is better for animation.
Totally in agreement in theory. But sadly, people in general are knee-jerk reactors who aren't really interested in abstract thought of this level. Or am I being too cynical?
I promise I'm not calling you out or anything. Please don't be offended, I just want to share a funny observation!

My wife actually has OCD and only our immediate family knows about it. Often friends will use "I'm OCD about X" as a figure of speech.

My wife and I simply look at each other with sly smiles.

I'd like to repeat that I'm am not calling you out nor am I offended. Just a funny observation. You never know if the person you are talking to actually has OCD!
So, you are looking for a programmer? Well, I am one. A goddamn good one. I can make a computer cry twisting its inner wires with just my thought. And I happen to be looking for a partner too.

Are you a solid-brass-balls entrepreneur not afraid of rasing money? Can you knock down every tabloid's door to get our story told? Can you set up appointments across the globe with people richer than god? Can you bring a thousand customers just the first month and two thousands more the next?

I can code the whole fucking app in one month and get version two ready the next month if that is what you need. See? That's execution, my friend. I can code apps blindfolded and with my hands tied. Can you do business like that? I don't want dreamers, I want doers.

Now, stop wasting my time with an idea, I have had plenty every day of my life since I started programming and I have spent twenty years perfectioning my skills. I know what I can do.

So, I ask you again, what are your business skills? Besides having an idea?
Now Dead: The Disturbed Man Who Created the Neutron Bomb
There is a bit of bad advice in here. You would want to do

<ul>
<li>something</li
><li>something else</li
><li>yet another thing</li>
</ul>

This allows you to use display: inline-block. If you put each li on a separate line there will be a single space between the elements.
Live stream of NASA astrobiology annoucement
Very very cool in concept. In practice... the content is borderline unreadable. Though I guess thats a me thing.
>When it is time to improve and upgrade, people usually use the original gadget cost to determine if the additional cost is reasonable.

This seems to be his entire argument: Chrome is free, so Chrome extensions are worthless. Pretty weak.
Lots of people don't practice in the areas they were educated in.
>"The flipside is that the company is profitable"

That's backwards.

The flipside is that the code is spaghetti. Profits are the hit single.

A good CTO puts profits before code aesthetics. The CTO is your boss. Going to CEO is a bad move.

Option 1: Bad code may limit the companies growth, but businesses can muddle along with less than optimum processes.

Option 2: Have evidence that the "issues" you anticipate are having an effect on profitability before having this discussion. After a couple of days you probably don't have enough information to make that judgment.

Option 3: Rewriting the code base is a team decision.

Good luck.
This thing would be great for story-boarding if it supported images and other media types. IFrame would be cool to be able to bring in external content into one of the notes. With a few more features, you got yourself a winner here. Making the controls contextual to the note could keep it simple. Let me know if you do decide to add other media types, I would be an avid user.
Hardly 'the only way'. With a animated arrow jumping up and down one can hint at scrolling. And by slowly moving bottom parts up and down you can hint at scrolling.
How about a retroactive refund for Norman Mailer because he wasn't portraying a murderer?

Jon Stewart's interview at 92Y was neither funny, nor satirical (I mean, beyond his natural humor,) can people get refunds for that?

These examples are probably a bit unfair, but seriously, I think a man of Steve Martin's stature has earned the right to talk about whatever the hell he wants.
[edit] I just noticed "seven" said basically the same thing I did.

Like the other poster below, I've written code for electromechanical automation long enough to have some idea of what you're in for.

First consider cost effectiveness: you can hire someone for $30/hour to clean your house. That covers the bathroom and probably another room or two. Nothing you're likely to build will beat that for a few years.

Second: you're looking at it from the "wrong" perspective. Instead of building a robot to clean the bathroom in the way you specified, it's probably easier to build a bathroom that's designed to be cleaned automatically. Imagine towel racks that rotate into the walls to keep them safe, vacuum-augmented drains in the floor, water proof floors and walls and a rotating wash head that can descend from the ceiling dispensing high pressure hot water and detergent. Combine that with high volume air vents, and you can clean the room in less than a minute.

Now, if we venture back into the realm of feasibility, why not a version of the Roomba that only does the floor, but has a scrubber, wet vacuum and washes with hot water and soap. Floor's usually the dirtiest area anyway and you can build that kind of cleaner for a few $100.

A maid would still do the job better and cheaper, though.
How Wikileaks Changes Things For Us All
Why people constantly stick to the idea that all possible organisms must have similar biochemistry to us is beyond me.

Think about it: Out of the humongous search space of chemicals, the ones we use happened to work for us. A combination of randomness and building on what worked before got us to where we are. Why should life not be able to use chemistry in completely different ways in order to replicate itself? Why are we so arrogant as to think that our design is the only design?

Edit: My point is that our ratio of "shit we know" to "shit we don't know we don't know" is infinitesimally small in the field of possible lifeforms' biochemistry. That is, we only know stuff very close to us on a cosmic scale; we effectively have blinders to all other possibilities. And there's already a lot of biochemical variation on Earth: To give some small examples, viruses don't even have DNA, and plants use less amino acids than animals.

The self-similarity of what we have so far can be explained, I think, by evolution. We all started out from the same point, so there's very little incentive to "reinvent the wheel" as it were. Only under extreme conditions like we have here, or the geothermal vents underwater, do we observe marked differences.
It's not ideal, but I'm pretty sure I can live with a system that lets faulty bombs through.
I launched http://www.agentshowroom.com/ with some help from phoenix24 I found on OfferHN who parsed a PSD to html/css for me.
Milo.com acquired, joins the eBay family
I must respectfully beg to differ on your interpretation. The way your describe your "computationally literate and well-developed idea " is not at all what most people consider an idea. It is pseudo-code, which really is the vast majority of the implementation.

Since I started using Python I no longer bother with pseudo-code at all, but when I was using Java I considered a complete pseudo-code 90% of the implementation and translating into Java to only be the last 10%. You touch on this by saying that its "close to "execution"", but I think you do not go nearly far enough. It is most of the way to execution.

To put it another way, I think having an idea is like standing at a starting line for a race. You havne't done anything except contemplating running the actual race yet. Having a fully developped algorithm in pseudo-code (possibly along with a thorough UI concept) is like passing the last mile marker. You haven't finished the execution yet, but you have gone a very long way towards it...
I don't know. You would think, but you can autoclave a solution of "deionized ultrafiltered water" which should have "no" carbon in it at all, and bacteria will find a way to grow in it if you get it contaminated, they will concentrate the trace trace trace amounts of carbon.

How carefully did they prep their DNA? These days nobody is careful and they use these crap kits which are good enough, convenient enough to get molecular biology done. The other day in lab I suggested someone isolate DNA using caesium chloride gradient ultracentifugation and the only people who knew what I was talking about were the two old (70+) year old senior scientists but they agreed that it was the way to go.
What opportunities did Google miss? They have plenty of cash, so I don't think buying YouTube prevented them from buying anything else they wanted.
It appears that two browsers (Firefox and Chrome) on the same machine can edit a board, but it can't be edited by two or more machines at the same time. Bummer.
Someone might do something bad so no one should be allowed to do anything.

If the people that founded this country lived by this, they never would have left Europe.
no offense taken at all. I am pretty OCD about a fair number of things like desk placement, tidy-ness of my apartment, layout of my kitchen, etc.

My wife and I laugh to as she will purposely leave her towel after a shower all wadded up over the top of the shower because she knows I will straighten it.

She even comes into my office and will move something out of place as she knows I will walk in and know something is wrong and correct it.

And she knows not to re-arrange the refrigerator without my written consent...or rather just letting me do it my way!
To get the bomb on the plane, he had to have a bomb that was ineffective.
Jack Moffitt: Erlang Gives You Super Powers [video]
Over the counter, spray-on stem cell treatment could treat burns on the go
Google + Bing Confirm That Twitter/Facebook Influence SEO
Stature or no stature, if a man who writes a book about art talks to an art critic, I think refunds would only be due if they talked about comedy.

I remember when Tony Curtis reinvented himself as a painter. Sure, people were interested in Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe, but who could blame him for talking about Art?
Zynga Buys Mobile Gaming Developer Newtoy
Img not working for me with / without pressing enter after pasting the url.
Let me time some things and give more exact answers. I realize I am being vague!

PHP and MySQL I use because I am comfortable with them. If you have suggestions, I am happy being uncomfortable to learn something new..
Javascript's onscroll event is a wonderful tool. It's one of the best ways to leverage an extremely common and expected interaction pattern (scrolling down a web page) to do interesting and unexpected things. I used it to create a sort of paginated-persistent-bookmark navigation for my new portfolio site earlier this year (in profile, if you're curious).
Craigslist's revenue is estimated at >$100m, and is mostly that low out of choice. Also, Google buys reach and influence as much as revenues with their investments (e.g. Android, YouTube)
There is something in the ventilation system on University Ave that breeds success. Congrats to Milo!
"from what I read there is no evidence that DNA actually contains arsenic"

FTFA: "When the researchers added radio-labelled arsenate to the solution to track its distribution, they found that arsenic was present in the bacterium's proteins, lipids and metabolites such as ATP and glucose, as well as in the nucleic acids that made up its DNA and RNA. The amounts of arsenate detected were similar to those expected of phosphate in normal cell biochemistry, suggesting that the compound was being used in the same way by the cell.

The team used two different mass-spectrometry techniques to confirm that the bacterium's DNA contained arsenic... Analysis with laser-like X-rays from a synchrotron particle accelerator indicated that this arsenic took the form of arsenate, and made bonds with carbon and oxygen in much the same way as phosphate."

It sounds like there IS some evidence...
Is this really still happening?

All the banks around here are open at least until 5pm and increasingly more of them have branches in supermarkets that are open until 7-8pm. I've so gotten used to it that I assumed the concept of "bankers hours" was a thing of the past!

I'm in the upper Midwest, is it just a regional thing?
*you don't think the discovery of the first organism to use a different element than sulfur was a big deal?

Oh wait, we all do it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selenocysteine
Why you should run your life like a start-up company
Bloomberg Ranks the 10 Best Forecasters of the U.S. Economy
doesn't matter if i press enter or not.
> Why are we so arrogant as to think that our design is the only design?

We're not. Nobody is. The reason scientists don't look for life on other planets that is made of other chemicals is that we may not be able to recognize that as life. It's much better - read, scientific - to look for something we can recognize.

Also, there are chemical properties of the elements that make up life on Earth that allow for fast reactions, bonding, etc. Most of the rest of the elements in the periodic table react more slowly in normal conditions, making the process for life less likely. Not impossible. Just less likely. We think.

So we focus on looking for what we know about. That's the best way to do it. Nobody worth their degree will ever claim that our "design" (bad word choice, by the way) is the only one.
I'm surprised so many of the links are in English.
Endemol to Incorporate Foursquare Into a New Reality TV Show
This is going to do wonders for Ted Dziuba's ego.
My Chrome Sync duplicates bookmarks and often deletes them too... On both XP and OS X.
I know a few academics, and they are rightly careful about sharing their ideas before they get far enough with the implementation (lab work, publications) to ensure that they will be credited.

Perhaps it is just different fields, but most academics I know (I know math from my own graduate studies and history indirectly through my wife) will talk your ear off about their current work if you express a willingness to listen much less an interest. Most of the ones I know (again math and history) aren't worried about idea stealing because they have more ideas than they have time to work on and they know that all but the most trivial ideas will take substantial work to go forward with, its the research that counts not the idea for research.

IANAL and everything, but some IP lawyers came to talk to a startup I worked at once to tell us about how important it is to shut the fuck up, and evidently simply being "the programmer" doesn't mean you have to be included on a patent.

IANAL, but this definitely fits with my limited understanding of patent law. But that does not mean ideas per se have value outside the law. This is more an indication that patent law needs to be reformed than that ideas have intrinsic value.

(Incidentally, Richard Feynman has an interesting story about how his name wound up on the patent for nuclear submarines in his book: What Do You Care What Other People Think?)
I could live with a system that lets working bombs through, too. I didn't stop flying after Pan Am Flight 103. Why was 9/11 so different? (More people died? But many, many, many more people die of preventable heart disease. Why do we have a war on people flying planes into buildings and not a war on heart disease? I don't want to die of either, and a bad diet seems a lot riskier than a random wacko hijacking a plane and flying it into stuff. Right!?)

I blame the cable-news rating frenzy for the over-reaction to 9/11. Everyone saw those planes fly into the twin towers. "Something drastic had to be done!", the pundits declared... and here we are. CNN got some ad revenue, and you have to let a rent-a-cop grope your balls to get on a plane. We defeated the terrorists for sure!
This comment made me try it out. I do wish I was a better typist. Maybe this is the kind of thing I could do in my spare time instead of playing Angry Birds.
The simple fact that the security concerns are less well known is in and of itself a security concern. In other words, the additional overhead for the IT department associated with assessing and patching vulnerabilities makes the enterprise less secure.

On top of that, what's the business case for using a Mac?
Seems like this post is 29 days too early.
Xeround explains NoSQL versus SQL in "NoSQL: The Sequel"
Reflections on entrepreneurship
I think it's more that this isn't very game-changing. Einstein revolutionized physics with relativity; Darwin revolutionized biology. What does this discovery revolutionize? Biochemistry perhaps, but it seems a bit too specific to have far-reaching impacts.
James Gosling on Apple, Apache, Google, Oracle and the Future of Java (video)
Pittsburgh Geek Night - tonight at Church Brewworks
Multiple sources:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1963247 - milo.com (this one)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1963126 - vator.tv

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1963125 - techcrunch.com

No doubt we'll see more as all the usual suspects pick up the story.
Multiple sources:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1963247 - milo.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1963126 - vator.tv (this one)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1963125 - techcrunch.com

No doubt we'll see more as all the usual suspects pick up the story.
Multiple sources:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1963247 - milo.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1963126 - vator.tv

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1963125 - techcrunch.com (this one)

No doubt we'll see more as all the usual suspects pick up the story.
This is one of those companies I actually really wanted to see get bought out by a large player.

Milo is a good site but has nearly reached the boundary of what they can offer at their current scale. They seem to have a decent interface to all the major retailers which offer reasonable inventory access to them. The next stage will require a lot more business development, data pushing and marketing. As a user, I can't wait to see the results.

Congrats to the Milo team.
It was more the boiling down of the argument, then limiting the responses with the statement, we can talk about cutting spending in another discussion that I found trouble with. Since there are only two options for governments to take care of deficits, cutting spending or taxing more, assuming that you simply have not spent money that you never had, when you limited the argument by not allowing cutting spending as a response, I was troubled with the implication that taxes would have to be raised. And frankly, I don't think there is much room for conversation with someone that feels raising taxes is an acceptable solution.
Sorry, I didn't mean that as a criticism. I wrote my first web apps in PHP/MySQL, as well. If you're serving video, you should probably use YouTube or the like.

Try to figure out "the life of a query": when you load a page in the browser, what happens? More to-the-point, how long does each step take?

(if you want specific advice how to go about this, feel free to ping me - my e-mail's in my profile)
It would be extra awesome if I could navigate through the lesson via keystrokes.
The joke being that Assange leaked the announcement before the press conference, if that wasn't clear enough... : )
NASA-Funded Research Discovers Life Built With Toxic Chemical (Official)
The author themselves are tyring to explain to you that "Our data are strongly suggestive of arsenic replacing phosphorus". Where suggestive =!= evidence.

Plus, read the paragraph "A world of possibilities" to see why so(FTFA).

There is no evidence. There are results that are compatible with that and other scenarios. Science is not so easy as you wish it was.
Ass much?