skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've considered LLC as well. Will that look ok for a national company? I guess I fear a stigma of being seen as small if I have "LLC" at the end of the company name. Is that silly? The S-Corp and LLC seem nearly the same for what I want to do.

Thanks for the NoLo link. I'll probably pick one of those books up.

But more importantly, once the LLC/S-Corp is formed, how can one properly feed it capital? And what about the money used to set up the corp? Can that be private money? I guess it would have to be because the corp doesn't exist yet, right?
Firefox 3 launching tomorrow, but does it beat Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera?
I think this post made by the Twitter team pretty much sums up their woes. (http://dev.twitter.com/2008/05/twittering-about-architecture...)

"Twitter is, fundamentally, a messaging system. Twitter was not architected as a messaging system, however. For expediency's sake, Twitter was built with technologies and practices that are more appropriate to a content management system."
Good advise. I'd recommend starting with something like Asteroids, because it's even easier than Tetris (no tricky rotation/bounds logic) and more rewarding.
The Word of Mouth Manual, Volume II
This is killer. I played for about an hour right out of the gate. I'm loving it.

Constructive criticism:
1) The ambush's seem lame without bait. Put a dollar bill at the far end of the room, or something.
2) In at least one situation I got a key that was just used in the next room I was going to in the logical progression of things. This doesn't add much to the game since I don't have to go find it and seems superfluous.
3) The Flash permission-ask is lame, but that's already been talked through elsewhere in this thread.
4) Where are the really hard fights in the objective rooms? Get bosses or REALLY pack them with baddies.

Kudos, overall, though. "Superb" is an apt description for this flash game.
Why don't you present a message asking users if they want to have the auto save feature or not? If they want, they need to enable a security option. Otherwise, they can play anyway even if scared by such option.
RIAA, MPAA, Associated Press. This is not good brand management.
I have tried it out, quite cool
That thought hit me too, but actively growing new crops will take out at least as much carbon as the bugs produce (nihil ex nihilo fit).

The problem with fossil fuels is that it takes lots of carbon that was safely tucked away and reintroduces it into the ecosystem.
I'm not sold on this, but I can see what the author is trying to say. It would have been good for him to make a concrete argument rather than one based on theory.

For instance, on several projects I've had code that used getters/setters all over the place. But there was no direct access to private variables. When I was debugging and had a private variable in a bad state, I just set the break point on the setter -- caught the bug every time.

Now maybe I'm out of whack, but I'd like to see another concrete example on the other side. I get the whole noun/verb deal -- heck, I teach it. But what I'm interested in is how exactly Object.Property breaks encapsulation? After all, the caller has no idea how the underlying storage/retrieval is executed.

There is a minimalist philosophy here -- only do what you have to do. I think that's the best argument he has. But he didn't specifically call it out.
Silicon Valley Launch: A Visit To Tech's Bleeding Edge
A LLC should look fine for a national company. There are a number of large companies that are an LLC or have subsidiary LLCs (E-Trade for example).

I would recommend that you find a lawyer and an accountant for at least an initial conversation about this. The selction of an entity-type and how you fund it are very specific to your situation and objectives.
"I feel like I'm missing something" - You're missing the fact that comments don't have to exist only on blogs. I as able to add Disqus comments to RSSmeme (http://www.rssmeme.com/) and not have to write a single bit of extra code. Very convenient.
"I would recommend that you find a lawyer and an accountant for at least an initial conversation about this."

I plan on doing that. I am a little curious about lawyer/accountant selection. Anyone know any good resources in the Atlanta area?
No, thank you, my good man.

As I've been thinking about it more, the most disturbing part of the tower design is not the low energy yield. It's far more alarming that this gets picked up as an exciting direction for development (judging by the discussion of the tower on TreeHugger, Inhabitat, and similar sites).

I desperately want us to figure out how to capture energy from renewable sources in an economically viable manner. If we don't do that, we are royally screwed. However, the central problem is not, for example, that we have no land for wind turbines or solar panels. The core problem is low power density. We need to be putting up the most efficient, cheapest turbines we can build in the windiest areas, not less efficient turbines in a not very windy area with the added costs of building integration.

It's not a good idea that won't quite work-- it's a terrible idea that's headed in the wrong direction. It's morons like David Fisher (the designer) who give conservatives a reason to say "Bah, that renewable energy stuff is a load of crap."
You may have helped me find some forms that do just what I need. Thanks!

http://www.nolo.com/resource.cfm/catID/401F3CD9-B02C-4FD9-BC...
Regarding the fear of being seen as small. This is probably a common fear and it's certainly something I felt at the beginning. Our initial documentation referred to "we" when it was really "I." However, it's good to get over this and embrace your true size. It gives people a chance to be impressed with you.

For example when we launched we were competing directly with Ning which had an ultra famous founder, 40+ million in funding and a two year head start. During an interview with TechCrunch, the reviewer said, "Oh, you're a one-man Ning."

That sounds a lot better than, "you're a third-rate Ning." We've since gone off into a vertical where we can actually be the leader but we're still upfront about size. People give a us a lot more leeway and respect for it.

Also, when will people see your incorporation status? The only time people see ours is when we bill them for services. There's no way to hide your size then. It's not like you can present a bunch of fake personas. So your size is going to come out in other ways and when it does you don't want to look like a faker.
AWESOME GAME!
Wayy better than 95% of the flash games out there.
Excellent oh btw if you're interested I'm the current maintainer of the Functional PHP extension. Perhaps we could share notes.
Ask HN: Do you swear in your code?
At my company, there tends to be some bad language in our code base. It's pretty common place to find F bombs in they comments. Is this normal practice?
If boot time is a concern for your servers then you're doing it wrong.
That's an interesting thought. Our product line would be named differently from our corporation, so I guess there shouldn't be a problem.

We would start with 4 shareholders and have two people working full time to start out, so we could say "we" from the start. :-)
i did in college, and also frequently used "TAMO" in comments

but then i joined a company that supplies source to customers.
I have a number of self-funded startups, and it is a case by case decision on what to do. IM me if you want to discuss.
If I'm not mistaken, I really don't think that you want an S-corp for a technology business. From my understanding, with an S-corp, all shareholders must be US citizens: http://www.allbusiness.com/business-planning/business-struct...

So, if you want to take VC funds, you're going to have to change to a C-corp. There's also a lot of maintenance that has to be done as an S-corp or a C-corp, that you wouldn't have to do if you incorporated an LLC or as a sole proprietorship. If you're just starting off, this might be a little tough to keep up with.

If it's just you, have you thought about setting up a sole proprietorship? You pretty much get your "doing business as" paperwork filed with the county, pay the business license fee and you're in business. After you do that, you can set up a separate bank account with your businesses name, and run the business off that bank account. Business taxes are handled on your own income tax. If the business needs money, put it in the account, if your business makes money, take it out. And, keep a decent set of books that separates your personal finances from the businesses.

As for an LLC, the primary advantage that will give you over a sole proprietorship is protection from getting sued. That is, if your company gets sued, they can't go after your house and bank account. And, it's possible to have multiple people as members of an LLC.

I've been mulling these same questions over, and my decision has been to work as a sole proprietorship until I have to incorporate. And, as far as I'm concerned, I'm not going to have to incorporate until I need to offer shares to employees or take outside investment.
Conclusions from that test:

- Safari is really fast at rendering CSS and slow to start up.
- Firefox 3 uses the least memory (though this isn't based on a "soak" test.
- Opera 9.5 is generally quick but is beaten on CSS and uses a fair bit of RAM.
- IE 7 isn't really good at anything except maybe loading time. No surprise on the loading time, but it uses the most RAM for open tabs!

JavaScript performance appears to vary less than some browser developers like to emphasize, IE is less than 3x slower than the fastest browsers in the JS test. (Opera + Safari)

I can anecdotally confirm the Safari start-up times on Windows, although it's a very different story on OS X. It does have to load its own GUI toolkit, although Firefox (XUL) and Opera (some in-house thing so it runs cross-platform and on phones?) also don't use native Win32 widgets.
Amazon Web Services group is actually an LLC, and I'd like to think they know what they are doing, though of course your situation may vary

http://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/developer/terms-and-cond...
I found that YUI Grids CSS to be very easy to use and extremely robust. Honestly, the fact that they do graded browser support is the main reason I use them.
Swearing in comments is unacceptable IMO. You wouldn't write swear words in internal documents, so why do it in code. It's unprofessional and shows a level of dis-respect for your own code and for the people who might end up maintaining it. Plus, heaven forbid a client happened to see it as well.
I don't think it beats IE, Safari and Opera. But hey, they've improved some memory leaks.

Better something than nothing.
Always assume that what you write is read by others than you intended. That goes for code, documents, emails, and test data.
So the moral of my story is you can give 1000 people a computer and even if only 4 people start doing great stuff with it, its better than no people.

They did spend EUR 200 for each computer, so if it only helped 4 out of 1000 kids, then you're spending a _lot_ of money on them.

Even more importantly, the research shows that overall, the kids performed worse on the measures that the researchers found important. So for those four kids that do start to perform better there would other kids that performed worse. (unless you measure success along different variables that weren't taken into account in this study, but then we can't really conclude anything until a new research is done)
Are you the only person involved in the company? If so, what's the reason you want to incorporate? If not, or not for long, what are the current/expected roles of your partners/investors/creditors/etc.?

I ask because I think it's common for hackers to get distracted by the myriad of different options (it's a kind of engaging puzzle) and overbuild the business side before there is a legitimate need.
I submit that, given the team at Twitter is already working hard at resolving their issues, they don't need much 'saving'.

There's been an awful lot of heat generated in the last few weeks about Twitter, and not much light. In fact, most of the light has come from Twitter themselves, and their newfound openness when communicating about their issues.

The fact that the media considers Twitter news-worthy, and the fact that there are many copycat services available and in development, suggests that Twitter is on to something. I hope that Pivotal is able to help them pursue their discovery.
As much as I respect the opinions and knowledge of much of the HN community, this is really one of those instances where you need professional help. Don't try to "do it yourself" this, it's too important and will have lasting effects on the company, you, and your investors. Seriously, get a CPA or new biz lawyer (local to your state - or where the biz will be legally located) and talk to them. Get some help with the paperwork. Go to someone who can really explain it all to you, as there is a lot and you might find your eyes glassing over (I know mine did). I realize that you're cash poor, and don't want to waste capital, but sometimes you gotta pay to play. A little cash outlay now can save you a lot of heartache later.

Good luck!

EDIT: this is a great resource to go into any meetings with the folks mentioned above knowing what you're talking about though. Knowledge is power! :)
Check out www.delawareinc.com for info on how to incorporate as a delware company to get a low tax bracket.

the way I read it, you can incorporate with 1500 shares at only a $60 a year min. tax rate. This way you can keep your costs low, and not have the limitations of an LLC.
Why would you use equity? If you already own 100%, it won't change the equity %s, so what's the point? And it will create headaches in accounting like increasing the fair market value of your shares.

Just loan the corporation money on an ongoing basis as a loan, and then pay it back to yourself over time. The only thing you have to worry about here is that you need to pay yourself market rate interest or the IRS won't like it if you get audited. But you don't need to make it complicated by paying interest over time. Just add it up all at the end and pay yourself back in a lump sum.
It is a fairly common practice. That being said, it's a bad idea to allow that to stand in your code base. It never adds anything to the clarity of the code, other than the fact that you now know the developer writing it has a bad temper.

While you're in there cutting out F-bombs, you should probably do yourself a favor and review the surrounding code. Foul language in comments are almost always put in out of frustration, so you probably have some good targets for code refactoring.
It's OK to do it in C++, if you must. It's very, very stupid to do it in HTML...
In Java, exposing public instance variables of a class is risky because any changes to the internal operation of that class requires modification to the callers of that class. If you write your accessor methods up front then you can add additional behavior to those accesses at a later point in time. That is largely a syntactical issue.

A similar reasoning causes the proliferation of interfaces and factories. The inability to dynamically create objects at run-time leads to a great deal of indirection created at write-time and compile time. That's a semantic issue which creates tons of complexity for little gain. Beans are a direct response to these limitations. For instance with most dependency injection frameworks you can alter an XML file to rewire Bean creation without having to recompile or modify the source of your Java codebase. It's a hack emulating a subset of the capabilities of dynamic metaprogramming.

The Bean style of operation greatly encourages all of these verbose design styles. Some of it can be avoided through introspection, aspects, and annotations, but that is very clumsy in Java. Java practices have indeed changed a lot since 2000 but the increase in incidental complexity is just stunning.

(major edits: expound upon my points.)
There will be four of us as shareholders, and possibly an outside investor.
Blueprint - http://code.google.com/p/blueprintcss/

We are using this on my startup, so far it has a very good layout system. It is very flexible and configurable for generating unique layouts.
Apparently a lot of public codes does...

http://www.google.com/codesearch?hl=en&lr=&q=fuck...
Prediction: A Microsoft-AOL deal within a few months
Boxee, a XBMC-based media center GUI for OS X and Linux, launches in alpha today
TechCrunch - Syndicated by the Washington Post?
The purist side of me agrees with the author. I try to design my objects around behaviors and make them appear stateless to other objects and other developers.

But sometimes you just need a data cow, and when the language makes you use objects you don't have much choice but to get/set.
Fuck yes it is.
All shareholders would be US citizens and I don't think this will be (or need) VC funding.

This isn't a "tech" startup in the YCombinator sense, but there would be multiple people involved and I want to make sure it gets done right. A corporation is partly there to protect our assets and to declare ownership.
Sometimes, but usually only in code I'm using to wrap my head around a new concept that I'm struggling with. I generally don't swear in code that's going live, or public at all.
As an added bonus, sometimes the get() will do something more interesting in a subclass, like query a piece of hardware or a remote sensor. In that case you want the getter as interface so that the client can ignore the underlying complexity.
Find local startup interest group (there must be more than one in any large city) and ask for recommendations.

Specifically, avoid "social" referrals from friends/family who did not have professional contact with person they recommend.

Also, try http://www.avvo.com for lawyer recommendations.

Also, try SCORE - it's a lot cheaper to have your basic questions answered that way rather than pay lawyers (something lawyers will not tell you).
Agreed. Aside from the whining from self-important, so-called "A-list" types, I think most users don't care about the growing pains and are just as happy to have it working 90% of the time as 100%. This would be different if it were a mission-critical government utility, but right now it's not.
i also have used blueprint to good success.

the biggest thing that i've seen with css frameworks is that, while they're good and useful, they don't improve productivity as much as other frameworks. they do, just not as much. imo, at least.
http://philip.greenspun.com/ancient-history/professionalism-...

...may be of interest. But that said, no, I don't. Furthermore, colleagues who frequently use profanity in their everyday speech strike me as rather disrespectful.
Honestly, you should set aside $1500 or so, and go talk with a lawyer that specializes in this sort of thing. It's risky to take advice from the internet when we could not possibly know all of the intimate details of your situation. A lawyer knows what questions to ask to help protect you and your money.
Blog spam?
http://lifehacker.com/396048/speed-testing-the-latest-web-br...
I plan on talking with a lawyer and maybe an accountant about this as well.
And an annoying anouncer shouting out "I'll buy that for a dollar!" and "Big money! Big prizes! I LOVE it!"
Thanks for the advice. I do plan on speaking with some professionals (lawyer, accountant, maybe therapist:-) ) about this as well. But HN is a great starting point. I really do appreciate the help I'm getting here.
Jivox matches local advertisers and user-generated video, raises $10.7 million
According to a more recent post, Yahoo! forced Paul to move to the C++ version in the Fall; he experienced some side effects, from what I remember reading.
Erlang: A Generalized TCP Server
I'll occasionally swear in a TODO comment, but all those get done and the comment gets erased.
Life artifically created in a lab
WorldWideScience: Like Google for Deep Web Science Stuff
The in-season dates for startup and programming news seem to be in the months preceeding YCombinator application due dates. I think the combination (pun) of a startup mindset at those times (possibly in both voting and submitting), and users trying to get some posts in, could be why.
I used Blueprint a long time ago, one of the earliest versions, and had a lot of trouble with it. Like any abstraction it's only flexible to a point and I feel like CSS being a presentation language means that that flexibility is hindered and your ability to recover weakened as compared to frameworks in turing complete languages.

That being said I haven't used Blueprint in a long time and I've used CSS longer than I've used any language besides HTML. I'm probably not so much in the intended audience.
I think the author is a little confused on terminology. The list management he's talking about, while a core part of the LISP metaphor, isn't normally considered part of "functional programming", which exploits more subtle stuff like lexical closures instead of "code-only" function/method references (a lambda is much more than just a function pointer!).

Now, I'm not up on my .NET these days, but I'm all but certain a C# function is still a classic CPU call, with its data living on a normal CPU stack and not stashed into the heap somewhere where it can be found by a closure. Am I wrong?
No, that's a little different. I don't want to type command-F, I just want to start typing and have that search the page immediately.
Some people don't quite get the message unless you use swear words. Especially when the message is "this code is used to be compatible with X, and IMO, X is not very good". 'Not very good' doesn't really describe the emotion that it gives you. I'm sure there's probably better ways to criticize another software system, but when you're short on time, sometimes swearing does the trick. Most often I've deleted such comments or re-written it with a more eloquent vocabulary. But in general, I don't think it's forbidden territory. Call it being passionate about your craft :)
Discover, Organize, and Share books with Bookhuddle (A social networking and book-reference site)
Interesting. I've just skimmed through this thing for about 15 minutes and have not stumbled onto anything other than fluff.

Did I somehow manage to miss it all? Can anyone point me to a bit of this book that's not actually just "talking about" word of mouth marketing, as opposed to describing how to do it? Not much of a manual to me at the moment.
Why Aren't Android Developers Flocking To The iPhone?
I don't have a habit of commenting stuff, so i do it rarely. I don't write allot of unclear code(tanks to python) so i don't have a lot of places to express myself in any other form but good code. I comment only hairy stuff. But i use swear words as a variable names sometimes if im not going to show the code to others, but they are usually not in English.
What everyone always tells me is, "forget about getting company structure right before you take an A-round, because the VC's lawyers are going to re-do everything anyways".

I'm not sure why, in what's effectively a sole proprietorship, you'd do anything other than an LLC.
I read through it all. Yep, fluff. Most books written by "guru marketers" are just self-marketing.
Also, consider using google as an email gateway. That's what I do, and it works perfectly. Only takes a few minutes to set up.

See http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ...
Nobody cares whether you're an LLC or an S-Corp. You aren't obligated to put the letters after your company name.

The major issues are:

* As soon as you have two "classes" of people (founders and employees), you need to be an S-Corp to give the employees equity.

* As soon as you want to take W2 wages instead of 1099 distributions --- that is, as soon as you want to stop paying your own taxes quarterly --- you need to be an S-Corp. S-Corp Principals take distros, not paychecks.
If it's true - good! Next up, artificial consciousness. But we need to learn to detect it first.