skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would strongly urge you to reconsider your approach and get a technical cofounder.
I've seen countless startups founded by nontechnical people outsourcing everything stumble because crucial technical and architecture decisions were made poorly in the beginning.

Outsourcing development seems almost orthogonal to the principles of building a startup-iterating fast, making do with limited resources, etc.

I've done consulting before for some startups that outsourced all development, and although they were run by brilliant business people, everything moved at an incredibly languid pace.Even something as simple as pasting analytics code into their site took several emails to their development team in India and hours of waiting.

And, although I don't know about this from experience, I would assume that lacking a technical founder will severely reduce your chances of getting funded.
No you missed my point.

Even the generic aspirin manufacturers can sell the stuff with little or no advertising.

The vitamins business has to spend a lot of money convincing to buy people stuff, the aspirin business doesn't.
Life at an Antarctic Outpost
On the other hand, the pagans whose rituals were plagiarized as christmas by the inventors of christianity were not above sacrificing money and other valuables, so I guess it's back to the old school.
AFAIK (and I may be off here), the government has not officially requested that any entity take negative action against Wikileaks.

The implied threat that action may be taken against them is there, and individual representatives have spoken out against Wikileaks, but I do not believe the government has officially asked / demanded for third parties to cut ties with Wikileaks.
If Visa cut off service with Apple, no one would say Visa was using force against Apple unless they violated a contract. If Apple didn't have a contract with Visa with some guarantees in it (for transition time or whatever) that was their own fault.

Everyone making 7 digits or more has lawyers, or should, to deal with such contracts.
My commendations. This is exemplary behavior. Prompt and courteous. Addressing the problem rather than blaming the person who exposed it. I wish others were such a pleasure to work with.

Great product and great attitude!
but what does that have to do with her gender? That was her choice (Well I assume a decision between her and her partner?) and it happens with Men too.
"We've railed on companies constantly in the past for being political"

I have no problem with companies being political, my only problem is when they use their disproportionate power to rewrite the laws in a way that screws all other stakeholders. Would Amazon hosting WikiLeaks be a case of a big company using their political influence to rewrite the laws to favor themselves while screwing everyone else? I don't think so, and I don't see any inconsistency.
If it is a revolution, then it is by definition illegal, and by univocation, illegitimate. It may be the 'right' thing to do, but it is not 'legitimate.'
Commercial posting -- flagged.
I tried to ask the same about removing TSA stories back in the day, and was flagged to death, so no.
I read that as she's unwilling to give equity to "...someone I met at an event for 2 days..." not that she's unwilling to give any out. If she's unwilling to give any out then I agree.
I actually found the "no dev experience" part to be the most interesting part.
It's not possible, there is no such conversion.

VGA is an analog signal. HDMI is pure digital.

The reason people might be mislead into thinking this is possible is because you can convert VGA to DVI and you can convert DVI to HDMI with nothing more than a simple adapter for each. But there's a problem with this. DVI has two forms: digital DVI (DVI-D) which is signal compatible with HDMI, and analog DVI (DVI-A) which is signal compatible with VGA but not at all compatible with HDMI. Thus in order to convert VGA to HDMI you would need not merely a cable adapter but a converter box.
A) It raises publicity. Keeps the story going, this is a front-page story tomorrow, and that story will include the fact that Visa and MC cut off donations to wikileaks without so much as an official letter sent.

B) If I'm some average merchant, I absolutely blame Visa. If they don't find a way to make me happy, I'll look at taking my business elsewhere. Might not be an option in that particular market but generally, yeah, they have to try to make it up to their customers.
The nice thing about a community of hackers is that things like this are already done for you. Use HN Toolkit to blacklist WikiLeaks articles:

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039
HN is not an appropriate forum for announcing new products for the company you work for. Flagged.
a protest has defied the law and the Government has reacted by giving the protesters what they want

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Town_peace_march

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_wall#The_Fall

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_parks#Her_Refusal_to_Move

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Satyagraha

I think you make a good point--the reaction to an attack is generally a stronger counterattack, not reconciliation--but there are certainly counterexamples.
I upvoted that request for the exact same reasons.
You know what is "illegitimate" is for a service that is a virtual "utility" do cut off service for political reasons. Imagine someone would cut off your electricity if they think your ideas a dangerous.
It's tricky b/c Amazon (for example) denies that they acted b/c the Govt wanted them to. Are they lying? I don't know. It's really hard to tell. They said Wikileaks violated their terms of service which is no doubt technically true; but I don't know if they would have been happy to overlook it without any Govt pressure.

So even if I wanted to get mad at companies that do the Govt's bidding without being compelled, I don't really know if Amazon is such a company or not.
She's in marketing...

Interesting how so many of the comments are about whether or not "female" belongs in the post.

So now she's in marketing, and smart.
Journalism is not an Attack, Wikileaks is not Warfare
Thanks for spell checking! As for the errors. Oh well. The main site structure is valid and works on the 3 major browsers I tested(Chrome,FF,IE8).

The first error is too beneficial to give up, and the rest are for a shitty form code (but this keeps my hosting cost at ~0/month which allows this stupidly cheap service).

But, you are right. And, I shall no longer advertise standards compliance. =D
> I'd imagine all their transaction processing happens elsewhere.

Yes, a good portion happens through https://verified.visa.com

Which, you'll note, is also down. This is real.
Often 40+ times. 25 is closer to the average, though. UI tweaks, bug fixes, config changes, and quite a lot of work on unreleased features. We never do giant deploys for new user-facing features. When they're released they've been running in production well in advance, and the product release is just a config change.
Google’s Nexus S Cannot Do Mobile Payments
Stuxnet: It's the real thing, baby
To me, the fact that Visa / MasterCard are in a heavily regulated (and to some extent, subsidized) industry is a separate issue. Perhaps the government should have less influence on these card associations, but the fact remains that they are still private entities.

Perhaps my analogy was not quite accurate, but I think your analogy goes too far on the other side. A subway is wholly owned by, and operated under, the budget of a government.

I understand, and sympathize with 12341sa's outrage, but his comment implies I have a right to purchase goods using a Visa or MasterCard.
Does $8.33 count as expensive in today's economy?

http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=102&c...

Maybe you're just shopping at the wrong places. Many places will charge you an arm and a leg for 6ft of ordinary cat-5 if you give them half a chance.
Changing the Hotel Pricing Model
What this whole wikileaks payment processing issue has made me aware of is how bottle-necked this whole area is.

A client of mine a couple of years ago selling personal protection equipment (smoke & hazmat masks, mostly). They were based out of Australia and selling globally. Apparently they breached some US advertising restriction with one of their products (disposable hygienic suit) by having the words bird flu in the description.

Simultaneously to contacting (apparently they tried to contact earlier during US work hours), they contacted paypal and had the account shut down entirely. The US was never a major market so they put a big red sign on the product page: "Not for Sale in the USA." Getting paypal back online took weeks. Whatever department shut them down was not concerned with reversing the damage and paypal seemed like they knew which side to stay on.

Basically, paypal (and apparently visa & mastercard) is the on/off switch that various players within the US government can use. It does not take a high level one off phone call. This is an issue.
There's a class of customer that won't even hit the "rent a coder" type sites for work, but will instead pay significantly more to someone with a full, proper site and a reputation.
'"being a mom of twins and a wife. I doubt any man doing a startup can say something similar.'

A bit hard given that men by definition can't be mothers and wives...

Seriously though - there is certainly a sense where adding the 'female' into the description of the reality actually does get extra information across. The fact is that life balance is often more important to women and they do still tend to get lumped with the majority of the housey chores in a relationship. Plus women have a much smaller window of opportunity to 'have it all' with biological clocks exhausting very quickly.

I do wonder if women might be better suited to start-up life in their forties. a lot of women of middle age and beyond seem to have an eerie kind of clear-headedness about things - whereas men really start to go to seed and have mid-life crises and all that. That's precisely the sort of time where men benefit the most from engaging in strong family acttivities..
how are you going about syncing? And what is your average document size (bytes, as well as attributes/elements)
Google has published a very short paper about a program, called Pregel, which expresses graph algorithms using message passing between vertices. Apparently its scaling doesn't suck:

http://www.royans.net/arch/pregel-googles-other-data-process...

They do try to group related vertices as much as possible, but if edges span computers, that's okay too. I assume that it works best when the interconnect between computers is low-latency, though.
Google acquires a company that makes robot sound like human
>we are not headed towards totalitarianism. Far from it. We are headed towards mob rule.

In Plato's Republic, he set up a cyclical theory of the progression from one form of government to the next. From aristocracy to timocracy to oligarchy to democracy to tyranny and back again to aristocracy.

The transition between democracy and tyranny was ochlocracy, a.k.a. mob rule, out of which emerges a demagogue.
That's a nicely written post. I look forward to reading the rest.
@anon_operations is back up! Twitter said it was an accident. Hrm.
She's not promising her devs 1% of equity for building the whole thing. She's hiring a dev team to build her project, and paying them work-for-hire.

The net of the article is that there's a lot of challenges building a tech startup when you're not a dev...that's valid.
The only legitimate forms of protest are the ones that will never work.
Web developer's guide
Netflix signs deal with Disney. Great news for customers.
Hmm -- and unfortunately for you, even though it masquerades as "just" a online fan fic, it's actually already the length of multiple books; the chapter count is in the 60s, and the downloadable "book-format" PDF is over 1K pages.

It's great fun, but yeah, you have to figure out a way to spread it out over a few weeks or you'll accomplish little else. :)
I'm sure the price reflects a compromise in savings between the hotel and the consumer. While this is a simple example, removing inefficiencies like this is a good thing for the company, and a good thing for the consumers.

By the way, much like the new reduced plastic bottles by Poland Spring, this is a great example of company innovations spurred by the environment. So many cost saving ventures would have been out of the question for companies due to image (What? You expect me to get excited about the fact your bottles are more flimsy??), and are now up for grabs. Companies that recognize this opportunity will do well.
OK. But I didn't intend to conflate my questioning of the use of 'grassroots' with my point about accountability.

I think the term 'grassroots' suggests a much more widespread and visible 'movement' than the tiny number of Anonymous members taking part in the DDOS attacks.
If the rules don't allow any options to fine-tune the GC's behavior how do you explain the use of options to fine-tune the GC's behavior here:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/program.php?test=fast...

and here

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/program.php?test=knuc...

and here

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/program.php?test=mand...

and here

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=pi...

and here

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/program.php?test=rege...

and here

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/program.php?test=revc...

and ...
Really? They seemed to print hand-wringing articles about how developed countries are too far in dept semi-regularly until the recent financial crisis. Example:
http://www.economist.com/node/275183
Am I smarter than Stephen Hawking?
What about projectors? Right now, I know that I need nothing more than a VGA connector to walk into any venue with a presentation because the end of a VGA lead will be available. I think it'll take more than five years for this to change.
False. You can convert from digital to analog: VGA graphics cards do this. You would need a full-fledged signal processor to do this, but I could imagine a box that did this (I could definitely build one myself, but I'm not strong enough in analog electronics to say with confidence that it would work at higher pixel frequencies; I've never done a project with analog signals over 100MHz)

[edit] So to answer the grandparent, it is possible; such a box would be expensive (read definitely more than $10, possibly a lot more) though.
I'm going to have to upgrade my monitor before then I guess :(

I love my 19" CRT. It's already a pain that my macbook can't reliably drive it at 1600x1200 at over 60Hz
I'm not sure, my first thoughts just were, I want to build this, and then I wrote a bunch of javascript.

Currently the site domain makes a reference to hipsters, but I don't know if that's a worthwhile niche.

I'm not sure what to do now, this is just entirely a hack without direction.

Anyone have ideas? What would you do if you were in charge of this?

Thanks.
I 1000% agree with you (this is the author of the article btw). I am constantly in search of a techincal co-founder and I will give equity to the right person, but that takes time. I feel outsourcing can get me to a place to keep the project going until I find the right person. In no way do I see outsourcing as the end all solution :) I have the upmost respect for developers and truly hope that I can find the right fit eventually for Swayable. Thanks for your insight!
And similar companies as well. It's a step towards preventing this sort of shit from existing in the first place.
You have to think that paypal is also being attacked, in that case I am pretty impressed that they are managing to stay up while mastercard and visa get sunk.
WikiLeaks: Winning the Info War Despite Assange's Arrest
Vala - Compiler for the GObject type system
All projectors I've seen made in the past couple of years will take one of

DVI
HDMI
DisplayPort

And DisplayPort can put out HDMI/DVI (The video part of HDMI is DVI) so a simple adapter should allow this. You will have a period of time in which people keep old hardware around to drive other old hardware, but it seems to me that when the bulb dies, just upgrade the damn projector!
Maybe "mother" would have been a better term to use?
Just wanted to point out that the reasons for the fall of the Berlin wall were TREMENDOUSLY more complicated than just protestors complaining about it. Comparing the fall of the Berlin wall to a DDoS attack on MasterCard feels like a slap in the face to history.
A bit hard given that men by definition can't be mothers and wives...

They can still be parents and spouses, even if a different (gender-specific) term is used. However, men rarely do the full-time father thing and, from what I have seen around me, even when they are unemployed and financially dependent on their wife, they don't typically take over the housework and cooking to the point of doing it 40 to 60 hours per week like women. (The last statistics I saw: full-time homemakers do 60 hours of housework a week, women with full-time paid jobs still do 40 hours of housework per week. Men have tried to take up the slack and are doing 10% more than they used to, which amounts to 10 minutes a day or 1 hour and 10 minutes per week.)

I'm a woman in my 40's. I've read that hormonal changes make men and women more like the other gender past a certain age. My sons are grown, I have no specific plans to have more kids, and my career goals are being given a much higher priority than trying to "find a man" post-divorce. So I can't say I would particularly disagree with your thought (in your last paragraph).
I had some fun rating things on Swayable. The total variety of different stuff makes it quite compelling.

Actually I think just the rating part alone would make quite a fun iPhone app (i.e. make that the focus of the app, as only ~5% of users will actually be creating Swayables). It's a fun game. However, your list of Swayables doesn't seem to be randomized at present - please have that fixed as it's always the same choices every time I visit the site.
Lets say you are an early start-up,less than 5 people, that has no revenue and is still building a product, with money being little or non-existent. Couldn't it be partially justifiable to not pay your rent/employees/electric bill to give you the best advantage to achieve success?
CapitalOne account center is down for me; I was trying to log in to access a Visa card. Coincidence? I have no idea why they'd be synchronously connected, but odd timing.
Probably, yes, but hard results from testing FTW.
Sigh. Did you even read the link you posted? Yes, one of the definitions has to do with laws, but there are plenty of other meanings that don't have anything to do with legailty. Eg: "not spurious or unjustified; genuine"
The Nigerian Scam and Me - A True Story (FB login needed)
I live in Romania, and although I was only 8 years old in '89, I remember pretty vividly what happened.

Such a huge mob can be prevented in 2 main ways - $ and Fear

Fear, Doubt and Censorship is what defined the Stalinist regime before Dec '89 in Romania.

The North Korean approach: Have such a huge military that
the rest of the country can not overrun it ever.

The military is formed out of ordinary people that can switch sides at any time. Also wars are won in the hearts first: you can make the military switch sides if you give the impression that this isn't a war they can win.

In Romania I still think it was a coup d'état, as the army switched sides quite early; but the mob was there, it was furious ... and it emerged out of nowhere. And it was interesting because romanians really aren't violent people.

Governments should learn to not piss off citizens: people can take a lot of pain before acting, but there's always a tipping point and from there onward it turns into a civil war between millions of people and a couple of thousand with guns (but that's a short-lived tactical advantage).
I don't think the exit should be anybody's primary motivation for building a company, and think most [good] VCs would agree.

> There are a lot of cool hard projects that have limited financial return.

You're right though -- it's a balancing act.
How will they report their attacks then?
The site hosting the paypal blog seems to be under DDOS attack. I've reposted it below so it's accessible.

-- Quoted Text --

Updated Statement about WikiLeaks from PayPal General Counsel, John Muller

December 8, 2010

Media reports today regarding a statement made by our vice president of platform, mobile and new ventures, Osama Bedier, at the LeWeb conference in Paris, have created confusion about PayPal’s decision to permanently restrict the account that was raising funds for WikiLeaks. We want to set the record straight.

As a global payment service that moves billions of our customers’ funds across borders and across jurisdictions, we are required to comply with laws around the world. Compliance with these laws is something we take very seriously. PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy states that we do not allow any organization to use our service if it encourages, promotes, facilitates or instructs others to engage in illegal activity. This policy is part of an agreement we’ve made with our account holders and with the companies that allow us to process global payments. It’s also an important part of our commitment to protect our customers and to ensure our business can continue operating around the world.

In 2008 and 2009, PayPal reviewed and restricted the account associated with WikiLeaks for reasons unrelated to our Acceptable Use Policy. As soon as proper information was received from the account holder, the restrictions were lifted.

The account was again reviewed last week after the U.S. Department of State publicized a letter to WikiLeaks on November 27, stating that WikiLeaks may be in possession of documents that were provided in violation of U.S. law. PayPal was not contacted by any government organization in the U.S. or abroad. We restricted the account based on our Acceptable Use Policy review. Ultimately, our difficult decision was based on a belief that the WikiLeaks website was encouraging sources to release classified material, which is likely a violation of law by the source.

While the account will remain restricted, PayPal will release all remaining funds in the account to the foundation that was raising funds for WikiLeaks.

We understand that PayPal’s decision has become part of a broader story involving political, legal and free speech debates surrounding WikiLeaks’ activities. None of these concerns factored into our decision. Our only consideration was whether or not the account associated with WikiLeaks violated our Acceptable Use Policy and regulations required of us as a global payment company. Our actions in this matter are consistent with any account found to be in violation of our policies.
IMHO, "not touching that" is not being neutral - is taking a position against WikiLeaks.

Being neutral would be more like "I'll let they keep doing their thing, like any other business."
Great tip! I am actually in phase 2 development now and updating that exact feature ;) making it more random and being able to sort by category. The iPhone app launches next month, along with a new site design :) Thanks for checking out the site and for your feedback!
IRC and 4Chan
Six Education Technology Predictions for K-12
Actually if you read the updated story, the State Department didn't say anything to Paypal. It was Paypal's decision.

That said, Paypal is not making nearly enough on transaction fees to cover wasting a single minute of a lawyer's time. If there's even a chance of there being legal issues with an account holder, it's almost certainly in their business interest to end that account.
It's not, a lot of the time, but in order to take advantage of that you generally need some domain-specific hack. More general solutions generally assume the possibility of interconnectedness at any point, ie, you can't rule it out, which means you'll need some kind of fast internode lookup mechanism as mentioned by pjscott.