skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To each their own - all I am saying is that I would not want to base my business on selling unhealthy food. I would not want to sell cigarettes, either.

The talk about customer responsibility is all good and well, but the fact remains that the "stuff industry" is exploiting human weaknesses all the time to make people buy stuff they shouldn't. I can't really blame them, just want to point out that customer responsibility does not necessarily work out so well. I guess if I shoot somebody, it is also their responsibility of being in the path of the bullet.

Edit: just thinking about it some more. I think it is also in the responsibility of the merchant not to sell crap to their customers. Sure, legally probably nobody could touch you if you sell crap. You can indeed say it was the customers choice to buy crap. But in general, humans expect a certain amount of fairness in dealings with each other.

You can probably get away with selling cookies, because customers are not yet broadly aware of the health implications. I wonder what it is like to be a producer of cigarettes these days, though. I could imagine that many people would react negatively towards such a person. What I mean is: society ultimately tries to enforce people being nice to each other, so in the long run selling crap might come back to you.
The strange decline of the paperboy
Here is a link to the demo page in case you wnat to see why this is cool.
http://jqueryfordesigners.com/demo/coda-slider.html
One has to wonder, if a government institution gets involved in a fund, what kind of regulations would be at play? Quotas for race/gender ratios?
How To Sell Your Used iPhone in 24 Hours and Actually Make Money
WOuld this be another way of thinking of it:

Lisp Macros are boilerplate without the duplication. (And so without the drawbacks)
How much money are you currently making? It's only worth it once it becomes significant. One other thing to point out is that if you are a US Citizen then you are responsible for paying taxes no matter where you are
Carl Zimmer - A New Step In Evolution
"In other words, the recommendation technology at Netflix -- the softwares that says: based on your past ratings of movies you should like this new one -- will spur rentals as if it were a film earning at least $1 million at the box office."

In other words, I am going to take an off-the-cuff statement with an absurdly round number, and treat it if it were actually fact.

"Let's say that increase in DVD usage amounts to 10% of total sales. That's a lift of $100,000 per film on average."

Let's add a few more hypothetical assumptions, with no basis in reality.

"Netflix currently offers 70,000 films. That means that Netflix's recommendation engine is worth about $7 billion to the film industry."

Now, we take our one hypothetical case, and pretend it were a law applied to all films. Voila! Now we've got our outrageous conclusion. QED.

Kids: don't try this at home.
Yep. That's what I thought. Thank you. I did say _whitehat_ only in the project I posted on getafreelancer. By the way what's OT?
Well put! I would have written much the same thing had you not beaten me to it, and will only add that sloppy thinking about this question isn't purely an academic concern: among other things, it leads to bad laws with difficult to foresee, but often undesirable, consequences.
No one has animal-style fries. FAIL.

(Can't wait to see ya, Harish!)
If I was thinking about becoming a trading partner of a business that was incorporated in an "offshore haven" then I would think twice. I would ask myself if I would still have the protection of contract law and if there was likely to be anything else slightly "rum" about an organisation that did not want to pay it's dues to society.
Agriculture had to become an order of magnitude more productive to meet the demands of a growing population. It did this through new technology. So Java was farming the old way and with new xml libraries and closures it will become an order of magnitude more productive just like farming. Do not worry java developers the sky is not falling.
| I update my blog and I want it to be known instantly. Google does not provide it yet.|

If your blog supports providing a dynamic sitemap, and notifying google that the sitemap has been updated, it basically does.

Check out: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator...

On your other points, I'd be pretty surprised if you couldn't provide a twitter-type service, at twitter-type message volumes, using e-mail as the hidden back-end. I don't think hundreds of local recipients would be that big of an issue, especially at twitter message rates/volumes. I'd be willing to bet it could be done pretty easily with a small number of decent servers. Then again, it could be that the Twitter folks know something I don't. Or they're just too emotionally invested in their existing back-end. No idea.
What about some sort of clean meta-language framework? Lisp can claim to be one of these -- it's the only language that is it's own Abstract Syntax Tree. Smalltalk goes a certain distance in that direction.

I think there is a great need for a multi-language framework, because different languages have such disparate power depending on what you are working on. I keep on thinking back to Rob Pike's Google Tech Talk on Newsqueak. He spends 6 months developing a language that does concurrency at a high level. After that, he writes a windowing GUI system in two hours.

What we need is the ability to support disparate language semantics and glue them together easily. It would be great to be able to model your business logic in Smalltalk, but write the GUI in something like Newsqueak.

Maybe Richard Stallman's original idea with GUILE was on the right track?
I posted "Quisquis custodiet ipsos custodes" on reddit, then immediately decided I wanted to check my spelling--I was already the top result in Google.
I'm not 100% sure, but attr_reader looks like it's actually a message send. If it's not, then it could be implemented that way.
I signed up, it's pretty cool. There are about 4-5 articles per issue. I'm still looking for one with a title I can parse, but this looks like a great resource. I've already marked down Pasadena in July '09 for the AI conference!
oh my sooo sorry, I love octopart - I was talking about the fantasy football story.. ;(
This industry is loaded with cash, they're transitioning from traditional analog video to IP-centric solutions and have no expertise. They all are looking for good software companies to buy. Drop me a line if you have a demo or something, I may pass it along.
US citizens pay taxes on salary and capital gains, which don't necessarily have anything to do business taxes. There are many perfectly legit as well as gray ways to get money from owners equity into a form you can enjoy it with much lower taxes than you'd get if you just paid yourself salary.

I think the importance of this area of discussion will increase when Obama starts raising taxes.
Unfortunately, solving the small problems well will never be as sexy as futzing around on the big ones.
Would-be NYC founders don't need another source of seed funding, they need a community. What NYC really needs is the equivalent of the Y-Scraper and a nice space for like-minded folks to hang out and work together and mingle with potential funders and mentors.
One word: indirection.

With each level of indirection, you get one more level of sophistication, but at the cost of one more level of complexity. OO has tons of indirection (+cough+ polymorphism +cough+).

Back in the old C++ days, before decent IDE's, I remember tracking through multiple code files in several different directories, just to figure out if an add operator had been overloaded - and if so, how. Man, was that a complex pain!

Lately, with Java, I've found myself in the same situation, but with XML config files. Some Java developers just love XML config files and often use them to direct reflective code execution (dynamic language envy). Needless to say, my IDE's are failing me again.
Ok, that is amazingly useful. I just added keywords for my most-used searches (generally special-purpose wikis). Way cool.
For starters, I don't buy your premise that most mail doesn't go to dozens of recipients - I don't have data to back this up but I'd bet that between mailing lists, spam, etc., the vast majority of email (by volume) is sent to multiple recipient.

And yes, it is true that SMTP doesn't use polling. But that is because polling for messages doesn't scale very well - a smart 15 year old could tell you that. I don't how twitter's architecture works, but if it polls all a user's subscriptions each time that user logs in then I say that was a bad architecture decision.

It would be pretty straightforward to emulate subscriptions with a 'mailing list' type solution. The simple fact of the matter is that Twitter chose a poor architecture. If they simply used an inbox/mailing list type solution all their problems would be non-existent and twitter would scale, near linearly, as you increased the number of servers.

Yes, it would be grossly inefficient HD space wise - but who cares? Normalization (seems to be) what got them in this mess. And disk space is cheap enough that it doesn't really matter.

Assume Twitter had a million active users (they don't), and that they each sent 5 Tweets/day on average (users don't), and that each user was subscribed by 5 Users on average (they aren't). That means about 5GB of Tweets are made a day. Using an inbox type scheme (with absolutely no normalization - which is unlikely) that would only require about 25GB of storage a day. Given reasonable cluster costs (and assuming data is 4x redundantly stored on the cluster), that would require well under a $100K/year in storage expansion (to store all tweets forever). Using semi-intelligent caching and partial normalization I think it would be pretty easy to cut those storage requirements in half w/o breaking a sweat.

I say again Twitter's problems are trivial - they just seem to have (initially) made a lot of poor design choices, and are now living with the consequences.
Give me a break. A big fraction of the DOW is offshore. Tax avoidance is a reality of business.
What Datebase System Do You Use?
Just curious what database system you use. MySQL? PostgreSQL? CouchDB? SQL Server? Who rolls their own?
A poker company I worked at created a second company off shore and it licensed the poker software from the UK registered one or some such shenanigans.

You definitely need a good lawyer that does this sort of thing. There are a lot of complications (in the UK at least) for share holders and their tax liabilities. A good lawyer needs to structure the company in such a way as to make it as simple as possible.

There are overheads. Host territories require 1 or more people to be employed within the host state for full incorporation. The more dodgy the place, the more reliable people cost. If you get it wrong they walk away with all your money and the host country doesn't really care.

To be fair the the poker company PKR.com incorporated in Guernsey (small island of the cost of france) and AFAIK it's all gone well for them so it can work. The thing is they see millions of dollars a day going through their account so it's worth it. They are a very legit Poker company and DO pay taxes in Guernsey but none to the UK government which are at a higher rate.

You definitely need a specialist lawyer. It's a moving goal post as countries change laws to try to stop this sort of thing. As goal posts move lawyers costs add up. You are looking at legal costs in the 25-50 thousand uk pounds (obviously I wasn't privy to the exact costs at PKR but I remember seeing the bosses face when the legal bills came in!).

Good luck.
Valley's wunderkind
Every language tells a story
how about this we are doing an e-commerce retail apparel startup. While its 100% web - we sell physical goods (i.e hoodies)
PostgreSQL.
Sun's purchase of MySQL is making it suck, to me that is.
Shouldn't that be "sudo make me a sandwich"? ;P

Congratulations, you two! May you have many happy years together.
Interview with Aditi on iAccelerator
we started off a while back on a small business marketing web app but have hit about every roadblock imaginable, so we regrouped and went in a entirely different direction.
Thanks, I'm still in the very early just-playing-around phase right now. It will, at best, be 6 months till I get something worth showing off - and probably closer to a year.

But don't be surprised if you get a strange email in a few months from 'that guy' you won't remember from YC ;-)
Never underestimate the power of tradition.
Was eBay a fad?
Whitehat? Maybe I misunderstand what you're asking. I thought you were just trying to find places to announce a new online dating app - am I wrong?

OT = Off Topic.
In terms of tax liability, afaik, if you control the company from the UK and you take money in and/or pay money out in the UK, you are subject to UK tax law, even if you're incorporated in Belize or something.
Give Me Something To Read
Photo editing with JS
(i love the python community, esp the meetings at GOOG HQ.

voidspace.org.uk
(great dev, great mind, but the un-design, ooh)

http://sayspy.blogspot.com/
http://blog.ianbicking.org/
http://jtauber.com/python/
blog.doughellmann.com
Lessons From How The Planet Communicated Their Data Center Explosion
Instead of over-complicating the fact that you want to pay as little taxes as possible, you ought to consider hiring a competent tax accountant who could likely give you nearly the same benefits by incorporating the appropriate location inside the US, without having to get into the considerable overhead of incorporating overseas.
Fair enough - if you don't want to sell something unhealthy that's, of course, your perogative.

I guess I always see facilitating a trade between willing participants as a good thing. As long as I'm selling something that people want, everyone is better off and I'm making the world a better place (in the pareto efficiency sense).
As a New Yorker, I'm psyched for this. I had a lengthy discussion with a coworker about how NYC is far less likely to breed the mind of an inventor. I showed him PG's recent article (http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html).

I hope this brings the entrepreneurial spirit to NYC. There's LOTS of creative people here but many get blinded by the dollar signs of some fairly mundane industries. I'd love to see some dollars backing innovative ventures too.
Car plows into bike race (amazing pic)
I would agree with most of these...or at least don't disagree enough to parse them out. I would add two more to the list that I wish I knew at 22...
1) Don't buy a house. Yes it may be a good investment. Yes owning/living in your own house does provide a lot of personal satisfaction. But it can really tie you down. Aside from housing market woes, you become invested in a house and can become incredibly attached to it. It makes it difficult to just up and sell it in order to travel. Even if you can travel for $1000 a month, that doesn't work if you have mortgage/bills/upkeep on a house back home.
2) Don't get pets unless you are willing to be tied down or have a built in plan for having the animal taken care of while you are gone. Dogs/cats are a long-term commitment.

I'm drawn to a more nomadic life, but am having problem breaking free because of these. Anybody else run into these problems? How did you solve them?
5 weeks ago, I had a question regarding aws and created a topic in the amazon forum. Afterwards I searched google again, with different keywords and I found my own topic. That was scary. Only a few minutes passed (at most 5)
Saving the Spark: Developing Creative Ideas
MVC Public Service Announcements
Thanks for the link. I'm not necessarily looking for cutting-edge technology, simply something I can use and experiment with for a weekend project. I live on a boat and have been perplexed by how badly designed the interior of most boats and yachts are, so just for fun I drew one up in 3ds max, and I'm thinking about building it. So I'm basically just looking for the best and cheapest way of doing it. If it works out well it might end up being a business but for now it's just a weekend project.

Some (early stage) renderings here: http://www.maximise.dk/yacht/
Yep, assuming the byte sequence is guaranteed to be valid UTF-8 in any case. But if there's a chance that it isn't, then it's probably coming from disk, network, etc., so the IO will outweigh the extra validation anyway.

Back-iterating works pretty well, too.

Indexed code point access is the only thing that has a real penalty, as it is always O(n) in time unless you add an O(n) memory position table with O(n) preprocessing time and O(1) runtime lookup. However, code point access only gives you so much anyway, as combining code points mean you can have more than one code point per character. You have that same problem with UTF-32.
I can't really defend Twitter's architecture, I am simply interested in the best way to implement something like that as well - but not as a centralized service.

Just a note: email does polling, too. Most email clients poll the server on a regular basis. But that is usually every 5 minutes or less? Twitter has just limited polling to 30 times per minute for external clients, if I remember correctly.

I haven't thought too deeply about it, but I wonder if a mixture between polling and pushing could work. Either it could be decided on the nature of the client if it should push or poll (ie how many subscribers does it have, how active is it), or clients could connect and say "please push for the next 20 minutes" or just send keep-alives. If client alive, push, otherwise let him poll? I doubt that polling could be eliminated completely. If an email server is offline for an extended period of time, the message never arrives. Mabye that is acceptable, though.
That matches my understanding. That's why PKR (the money side) is a seperate company from PKR (the development/services) side. One hires the other to do work.

I'm sure this is an over simplification of how it really works but that's how it was explained to me.

Anyway as the development company doesn't get much more then the development/support costs so doesn't pay much in taxes.
mysql, mostly because it is easy and i don't have any projects that run into mysql's shortcomings or aren't DB agnostic. might eventually switch to postgre.
I completely agree with you! (smanek)
Corollary: you're more likely to regret not doing something than you're going to regret doing something.
When Robot Programmers Get Bored
Effective Emacs - "Nobody has been using Emacs longer than I have"
I have Simon Willison's personal site in Google Reader. Lots of Django there too.

http://simonwillison.net
10 Places For Design Inspiration
Interesting look at ebay. I still buy any obscure stuff I can't find on CL from ebay...
I don't think eBay has continued to innovate in the auction space. For instance, I often want to bid across multiple auctions until I can get something for the price I want. eBay has something to do this (called Bidding Assistant I think) but I found it to be inflexible and difficult to use. Now that the novelty of auctions has worn off, they need to improve the productivity/appeal of them.
Why the emphasis in the OP and your comment on travelling? I'd say it depends on what you want out of life, and in what order. I'm happy to go see the world when I'm retired.
If you want to be a better programmer -- Learn Rails

If you want to spend your time creating a new business -- Stick with PHP
What I'm working on is fine-art photography, and the web site that I am designing is primarily intended as aa marketing tool, though I do plan to sell from it.
Why not concentrate on increasing the size and value of the business? As long as your growth curve is good, it's more worth your while to sink your time and energy into that, than trying to save some pennies here and there.
I am trying to announce a new dating app. It's just that when I first posted the project yesterday at getafreelancer.com the bids I got seemed to be the spam kind. So, today I added 'whitehat only' to the project description. I also added the requirement to 'write new ads around the basic template - in good english - and post to around 5 - 10 cities a day.' I'm trying to make it a legit promotional project. Here's the url: https://www.getafreelancer.com/projects/269701.html. This is what I meant when I said 'borderline' in my original post. Thanks, again.
Consider Delaware.
That's what you get from companies that don't understand the value of experience.
I am pretty damn sure the corrupt leaders in countries like Nigeria and Kenya (where I was born and raised) will not be swayed by an online petition! Rather than use this forum as a petition, you might consider leveraging the intelligence and experience of this group to discuss the issue of the digital divide and possibly offer suggestions as to how we could bridge it.

For example, as hackers and entrepreneurs we could work to develop an open online app that could make it easier to introduce kids in developing countries to CS and provide mentorship in some way. At MIT there was an program called AITI (Africa Internet Technology Initiative) that sent students to Kenya, Ghana and Ethiopia over the summer to teach programming to high school kids there. What about a project that would provide some seed money to local African entrepreneurs to setup educational internet cafes in communities there?

It is a huge problem and would be really interesting to discuss the issue further here.
Do you have a reference for "a big fraction of the Dow is offshore"? Your claim motivated me to try to find facts, and I couldn't find a summary either way.
Is there any merit to this wiki? The author isn't known but does the stated reason worth abandoning mod_python? I don't think so.
The big problem with OO is that it is a tool, not a religion. A lot of schools teach it as a religion. There is nothing special about polymorphism or inheritance or encapsulated data. There is no purpose in having any of these things in your code. What does have purpose is to create easily reusable code that can be cleanly changed when requirements changed. The tools of OO (polymorphism, inheritance, encapsulated data et al) is one way to achieve this. But while it is possible to use OO to achieve this kind of code, using OO does not guarantee it.

I think the problem is further exacerbated by calling some languages "OOP" and others functional, or procedural, or whatever. Fundentally a programming language is none of these things. It is possible to program in a procedural style in java (make everything static or singleton) and it is possible to program functionally (but the syntax is very cumbersome). Similarly it is possible to program procedurally in lisp (do, and, etc) and CLOS. Some languages are more enjoyable to program in one style over another but if, like a lot of career programmers, you think programming in java means you are writing good OO code and because you don't care about the quality of the code you write, you just want to do a good enough job not to get fired, and because you know someone else is probably going to have to maintain it anyways, you write the code in the easiest most quickly completed way instead of the best overall way when considering debugging and maintainence times.
I'm not sure if this is really the place to be asking a question about style and fashion :)

A) Yes I would go to this if it was branded correctly and all my friends were going to it. I wouldn't go there regularly. For examples that are working in Portland, OR check out Voodoo Doughnuts and Saint Cupcake

http://voodoodoughnut.com/

http://www.saintcupcake.com/

B) You would need a bank loan, perhaps backed by SBA.
Buying a house is a great idea if you ask me, so long as you don't pay over the odds for it.

If I want to travel, I can rent it out (the rent will cover the mortgage) and in 12 odd years I will owe nothing on it, and can live rent free for the rest of my days (or buy a bigger house) - I am only 28 so by 40 the house thing is largely sorted, which is nice ...
fixed-mobile-convergence