skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At this point, my faith in this community is slowly being evaporated. Where I would normally look to this site as quite possibly the most objective source of information (from a entrepreneurial perspective) and a source of honest opinions and as a frequent internet observer (I really do place so much value on all of your comments and to my knowledge, almost all of them have had a significant impact of my life and my decisions), I am scared to what this community has become. As someone who followed digg and reddit from the early days, I transitioned to this site because I valued all of your opinions, which I believed to be honest. All of my submissions (all ask YC/HN) have been to consult the community on decisions that affect my life to an unbelievable extent. I really am just so confused as to what I said that has offended the community to result in such an extreme display of downmodding (including those that disagree with me). Please just explain yourselves and opinions rather than downmod all of the threads opinions.

EDIT: As an indicator, my Karma has dropped roughly 20 points within the past hour or so, I just really would love to know what aspect of what I said that has made all of you to so passionately enforce such an action. Maybe I have not established relevancy to the hacker community as to why this story matters and that is fine (or maybe you all just disagree which is fine with me as well). I cannot reiterate enough, for my sake, please just let me know what I said that was so offensive. Please refute.

EDIT 2:

I just would also like to say that this comment has no relation to the one that has been associated with my comment (the one that has been placed below mine because the one it is associated with has been deleted).

That comment goes as follows:
Look, I'm an Obama supporter. It's just that as far as I see it, this sort of thing is better left to other venues.
Power generation by burning silicion from desert sand.
APC is very nice because you can really plug it in and expect to get performance improvements without any “real work.” That said, it really depends on your architecture and the traffic/usage patterns you expect.
Do you get more reads? more writes? Do you use InnoDb or MyISAM?

Do you have a cache policy? For files? For DB data?
Do you use the APC user cache or Memcached? The APC user cache is faster (on the web front-end), but is not shared. Memcached is shared but there will always be small network latency.
If DB access is a bottleneck, consider using a data cache.

Do you serve a lot of static files? Consider using a CDN (not a silver bullet! There are drawbacks.)

There are a lot of strategies for high performance on http://highscalability.com/ . But don't overdo it! Most of the time you don't need to set up your infrastructure to be scalable for millions of clients.

As missenlinx pointed out, try also to speed up the page display by following Yahoo! recommendations on http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html ; The number of requests per page is certainly something that made a difference when optimized, at least in my experience - YMMV.
Yeah, a quick look at Wiki shows that there aren't many VCS compatible with the BSD license.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_revision_control_...
Why Politicized Science is Dangerous
No, command-line only.
have vesting, definately - along with a cliff that means people have to stick around long enough to produce something of value before they get to "take home" any equity at all.

if you're just starting out, and pre-outside investment, my advice is don't worry too much or waste time/money on legal fees - concentrate on your core product/service and leave the legals until you agree to take on funding.

suggest all you need is a simple agreement between the founders that deals with:

1. the (fairly high) chance that people may leave (for whatever reason) and new people may join before you reach the next stage, and

2. what equity split the founders get (suggest equal unless there's a major difference in input e.g. one person full time, others weekends..), a common understanding of what's required to maintain this (i.e. effort/results required) and a simple procedure for what will happen if people's input doesn't match this (basically make sure everyone accepts that they don't get automatic entitlement to their share up-front - they have to work for it, and if they don't pull their weight then the others are entitled to ask for a review of the split)

if you have a situation where some co-founders are "conspiring" against another, there's going to be little point in that founder trying to stick around - something underlying will be seriously wrong and the startup's chances of success will be majorly scuppered - so i think thats a risk everyone has to take - it's down to each individual member to make themselves crucial, and if your co-founders turn out to be s then take your vested shares to date and move on quick.

of course change everything soon as (or just before) outside investment - raise enough to cater for paying your lawyer to sort this when finalising the deal!
Very simplistic look from someone who has obviously never performed said "integration testing".
Shotgun clause, anyone?
Looking at del.icio.us's bookmarklet may be a good start:

javascript:location.href='http://del.icio.us/post?v=4;url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+';title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title.replace(/%5E%5Cs*%7C%5Cs*$/g,''))

Basically, it redirects the browser to http://del.icio.us/post?v=4 and passes two parameters to the URL: "url" and "title" which just contains the url and the website title of the previous website you were on.
Now /this/ is an area of science that I am extremely interested in. By the off-chance, does anyone know where a mathematician by trade (read: math major) could focus his efforts to get involved in this type of research?
>I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me. -Hunter S. Thompson
Well, its still a nice upgrade from CVS.

(Atomic transactions!)
I can't wait until the super-resveratrol currently undergoing human trials for people with Diabetes hits the market. I hope I can afford it soon.
I'm currently in the middle of trying to incorporate offshore.

I'm going the offshore way because:
- Creating a company in my home country (france) is way too complicated and I don't want to pay tax to support a government I hate (sarkozy)
- I'm currently living in malaysia on a tourist visa and as such it's difficult to create a company there
- Since creating a company is going to be difficult anyway I might as well spend the time to find out what is the best place to incorporate without having to pay too many taxes...

Now I've just started to search for information so if you want we can share what we find about this.. You can contact me at pm -at- gom-jabbar.org
What dosage and what brand? To get clinically significant levels of Resveratrol for life extension was prohibitively expensive last time I researched this.
It is not ridiculous, since people aren't downmodding to express a difference of opinion about what the person said. They are downmodding to assert they do not want to hear any political opinion on Hacker News, because--as has been said--there are countless other venues for hackers to express and debate political opinion; Hacker News is not one of them.

Notice therefore we see something interesting regarding the HN system. In essence, this is exactly what pg had in mind. Karma is taken away for comments and not just submissions, so that users will adapt to the Hacker News atmosphere. As we have seen from this thread, politics (even "news" like the first ever black general election presidential candidate) is simply not something people are interested in seeing on HN, and if people keep discussing it, they will be downmodded into oblivion, effectively maintaining the current HN mindset (since, presumably, people with negative, or quickly decreasing karma, will not want to continue posting on HN).

The only thing that could break such a system is a vast shift in the mentality of the community (which is not a bad thing since it would still keep the community happy, although it's very unlikely to happen), or a massive influx of new people into the community (which is why pg wants to keep the number of new signups per day low).
Correct analysis, but the downmodders are acting uselessly.
That would be a fun project. I have yet to do much with cnc machines, but am looking forward to doing new products that way. my email is kzo@kzo.net
Youtube adds Omnisio-like annotations to video
That makes 3 of us that have lived on boats a lot.
good questions - i understand most of them were kinda rhetorical, but for the purposes of useful discussion:

our app is generally more reads, but we're optimising different parts depending on the read/write balance. mix of innodb & myisam - my understanding is MyISAM better for reads, InnoDB for Transactions and Row-level-locking => better for lots of writes while still reading .. that hold water as a good uber-simplified rule of thumb?

not using APC user cache or Memcached yet - thanks for pointing out the differences. The FB presentation linked on the other thread gave central app config data as a good example for using the APC user cache

for interest - what scale do you need to reach before justifying looking into a CDN? (we're definately not there yet!)

more generally we're building features focusing on developer productivity, then optimising as bottlenecks arise.
Lately we've been looking at geolocation stuff as well. Adside from MaxMind, we contacted IP2Location and Quova (never heard back from Quova).

We are not in the US and were looking for a service that could provide geolocation to a more detailed level than city, preferably postcodes. We have not found a service that could do this for us as accurately as we were hoping.

But if you're in the US and/or just looking to resolve IPs to cities, then both IP2Location and MaxMind seem like they'd be worth looking into. Both companies were quite responsive to email contact.
I think that because the LISP community pre-dates the web, it's not nearly as visible or accessible as post-web languages. For instance (I am a LISP newbie too) I was looking for a way to do the equivalent of:

cc -o myprog myprog.c

The actual way to do this in LISP (saving a memory image) is hairy enough, but even finding out that that was what I had to do was a ridiculous amount of effort. Not only that, people say "but there isn't only one implementation of LISP" but GUESS WHAT CHUMPS - there is more than one implementation of C too, and in my experience all C compilers can be used as per my example. Why can't I do

clisp -o myprog myprog.lisp

There is no sensible reason.
This one address your question: http://betterexplained.com/articles/how-to-make-a-bookmarkle...
I disagree. Read my post again, I added two paragraphs. It's very useful behavior, in fact (imho). It preserves the nature of the community quite effectively (albeit at the expensive of causing temporary upset).
what's your startup in town? I'm in Kailua doing a not at all related to programming or hacking startup.
"The goal is to help readers learn more about McCain and make more informed decisions as citizens."

Is that really Huffington's motivation? Whatever you feel about any candidate, it's always worth noting which way you're being herded by your news sources, especially if they have a veneer of neutrality or objectivity.
Hi guys.

I love discussing politics. Talking about your philosophy of life, government, and moral obligations to your fellow man (or not). Even the idea that political choices are mostly emotional and then justified by logic is a way cool topic.

Just let's not do that here, okay? I like you guys, and I'm not interested in pissing off half the crowd with my political views. Nor am I interested in reading a bunch of "heck yeah!" posts about any party or candidate -- I find them pedantic. I've got plenty of other places on the net for that stuff.

Now a story about opportunities for how startups are making big bucks with new technology in the campaigns? -- love to see some of that stuff.
I have found that when I do sites for myself, usually use this approach and minimize the initial design in Photoshop. For clients I try be "professional" and use the paper-psmockup-apporove-code flow.
Offering good journalism about the opposing side legitimizes Huffington Post... there surely is fair and balanced journalism about McCain out there somewhere.
I rented a cheap room. Got an internet connection and then invited my friends over. We hack a few hours every night after work. We each have our own projects (outsourced ones or pet projects).

The good thing about this is that we never get bored. and we share our ideas.
Wow - talk about an optimistic approach to business. I have to say that IMO this is horrible advice. You need a lawyer for equity deals - you'll never convince me otherwise. Your "simple agreement" is fine - as long as it was written/reviewed by an atty w/ experience in this particular subject. Having a partner, dissolving a partnership, firing a partner - those are rarely simple "plug and play from a handbook" type of situations. You need a document that handles everything known to man. The more you spend up front on this one not-simple matter means you spend less down the road.

"If you can't afford to do it right, don't do it at all." You'll potentially save yourself a ton of money and stress if you follow that sentence. Don't start your business if you can't do the legal/tax stuff correctly. Don't go into a partnership if you can't do the legal/tax stuff correctly. Any other advice IMO is just overly optimistic. "But it'll never happen to me and my best mate, Jimmy - we'll be buddies for life!" Of course you will...
If cakePHP works for you then use that. I'd look to build something that uses something that PHP and cakePHP is good at.

For a while I've been thinking about a wikipedia for apps. Where people contribute code rather than text and help others build applications out of it, by using a plug-n-play sort of functionality.

From the 10 minutes I spent thinking about PHP, it seems to me that the one thing it has going to it is that it makes it easy for your users to upload code onto the site to modify it. E.g. Ning and Jotspot.

So maybe instead of a cpan for cakephp. A cpan for web apps.
Where I can go to create a basic application, by choosing modules and plugging then together or adding applications that others have built to my stack.
In Defense Of Failure
Blighty joins killer robot club with Afghan strike
FreeConomics Part II - or why your data is free but everywhere in chains
Check out 37signals.com and BaseCamp. There are tons of books - a little google searching is in order.
I started up two companies while still working a full-time job. Good luck, I know it's not easy, by far.

You gotta do what works for you and gives you enough time. I think a good approach is to figure out which part of the day is your most "high quality time", and be sure to work on your highest priority in that time.

For me, I found that morning was my quality time. After a whole day of working, I just didn't have the energy to do stuff anymore. Since I had a strict 9-6 job in a bank/consulting firm, I had to put my quality time before that.

So, for 6 months or so, I woke up at about 4am every morning, then worked for 3 hours, then had a 1-hour nap, then went to work. I'd go to bed before 10pm (else I couldn't work the next day). Sometimes I had evening meetings for my second startup, just to keep things even busier.

The most important thing, I found, was actually to get the support of your friends/partner/etc. My girlfriend was really understanding and cooked dinner for me every evening (even though she hates cooking) and that probably saved me a precious 45 minutes every day. Makes a lot of difference when you're really overloaded.

Anyway, so, simple method:
- prioritise your startups
- allocate the quality time each day to your number 1 priority
- make sure your friends/family/partner support you 100%

Oh, re: constant/changing schedule, I kept a mostly constant sleep schedule, because otherwise I couldn't cope. So I woke up at 4am every day during the week - gave myself an extra 2 hours of sleep on the weekend by waking up at 6. Went to bed at 10 pretty much every night though, week and weekend.

PS: I should add I also took some Modafinil in the morning, that helped wake me up while still allowing a morning nap.
wrongdoing from Redmond? Now, that's strange ;-)
The obvious choice: http://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+build+a+bookmarklet
I use TinyUrl and the Wikipedia bookmarklet more than any others: javascript:(function(){q=document.getSelection(); if(!q){void(q=prompt('Wikipedia keywords:',''))}; if(q)location.href='http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?search='+escape(q)})()

Here's an amazon.com lookup one as well: javascript:void(q=prompt('Enter%20text%20to%20search%20Amazon.',getSelection()));if(q)void(location.href='http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/external-search/?keyword='...(q)+'&amp;mode=blended&amp;tag=blogography00-20&amp;Go=Go')
I'm in Dallas but I thought this was an interesting question and I want to take part :)

I'm an early-morning riser. I have two kids[0,4] and a loving wife. I like to be finished with work no later than 6:00PM and usually closer to 5:30. I still have to work 12-14 hour days so I wake up at 3:00AM two days, sleep as late as I can on the third day. I do that pretty religiously although some weeks it's a 4:00AM wake up (or not at all). Sometimes I get burned out after a few months and then I'll just sleep until I wake up for a week of so.
You mean Netflix meets Bittorrent meets the US Government.
On the other hand, DSL and cable connections in Central Europe have had these kinds of limits for ages, and the flat fee and "fair-use" style contracts have only been offered on a broad scale for the last 2-3 years or so. (my parents & sister were on a 2.5GB/month contract until about 1½ years ago)

I suppose it's not held up the massive expansion of broadband as much here because the alternative, dialup, is even more expensive, at generally between €0.01 to €0.015 (~$0.015-$0.02) per minute. We've always been used to paying a premium for internet access, so when something comes along that's better value for money, more people jump on board.

The capped or pay-per-megabyte contracts are still the norm on mobile (EDGE, 3G/HSDPA/HSUPA) internet access though. But mobile communications contracts in general already have pretty draconian terms in my experience. (minimum runtime 24 months, small print overload, etc., at least you aren't charged for receiving calls/texts these days anymore)
That is a lot harder than it sounds. I work the opposite way usually: I'm long-winded, I tighten it up, tighten it up some more and then I'm finished. It is sooooo difficult to get what I need across in just a few words. I don't know whether it's my programmer's mentality (developed after reading 20+ 1,000 page programming books no doubt!) or what but it's very difficult for me to write just six little words.
i disagree with the sentiment here - specifically "If you can't afford to do it right, don't do it at all." which i've understood to mean "if you can't afford to pay a lawyer [on day one], don't start a company".

to clarify, by "pre external funding" I essentially meant "pre money" - so situations where you're not bootstrapping yourself to the tune of several tens of thousands - e.g. pre-YC, idea-stage companies - when you're just getting started.

example: say if you have between zero - 10k to spend, don't spend it on legal - there's bigger risks/more important things!

i agree you need a lawyer for a proper equity deal - share classes, tax, voter rights.. yuk! but you don't need all that on day one - just an agreement that "if we get to the next stage, we'll be equal partners assuming you do X and I do Y".. ok, and a bit more than that, as i said previously.

i've been through all this, and regret worrying too much about legal/shareholder details in the beginning. sure, we had team issues, guys coming and going, and guess what - they $2k and countless hours we spent on legal did't help at all - and in the end our first shareholder agreement was ripped up the moment we raised angel.

finally, i think anyone starting a start-up has to be optimistic! but optimistic doesn't mean not believing the worst will ever happen to you - i specifically said there's a high chance your team won't survive in it's original form.

[edit: screwed up double-negative in final para..]
Very cool. Anyone here able to comment on the SEO aspects of using such a strategy?
could FreeBSD be avoiding Git because Linus wrote it?

No. FreeBSD is avoiding Git because Git isn't capable of handling a project the size of FreeBSD.

As I see it, the major reasons for choosing SVN were (a) it was possible to convert FreeBSD's 14 year old, 1.8GB src repository to SVN and have things mostly work (there are a few bits which didn't convert properly, but nothing major), (b) there are SVN gurus willing to do the work necessary to fix the bits which didn't work, and (c) SVN is the most CVS-like option available.

That last part is quite important, incidentally -- there has been an experiment with using Perforce for a while, but it has been limited by the fact that FreeBSD developers want to code, not waste time learning new VCS systems. SVN looks and acts like a better version of CVS -- for a community of experienced CVS users, it's a very easy tool to learn.
What specifically are you wanting? SEO, web design, SEM - all of those could be separate $5000 projects apiece (or higher).
There are a couple of things. Satellite and EVDO. Both are downgrades, but better than a 5gb bandwidth cap.
Cool - I hope someone from YC wins!
Interesting. I fully buy into the "My time is money" idea and almost always use that when it comes to "Build vs Buy". If it's break-even or worse, I buy. I use a lot of 3rd party controls on our sites but hand-code 99% of it as it (1) fun, (2) a great learning oppty, and (3) sometimes off-the-shelf controls do not do what I need.
Assumptions Kill Your Estimates. How to Fix the Problem.
Your question implies that (1) someone who I don't get along with but knows the work is possibly a good fit, and (2) someone who I get along with but who can't do the work is possibly a good fit. Why does it have to only be those two choices? I would say "They must be both" but that is such general advice for any situation that I doubt it is helpful.

This is a very general question that Google would do a great job of helping you answer. If you asked a more specific question(s), perhaps we could help more.
They're probably avoiding git because it's GPL.

I wasn't involved in all of the VCS discussions, but from what I remember, the license question wasn't brought up at all -- I didn't realize until five minutes ago that SVN was Apache licensed, and we've been using CVS for many many years despite it being GPL licensed.

FreeBSD developers want to produce BSD licensed code, of course, but we're not zealots about the tools we use -- we'll use GPLed tools (e.g., CVS and GCC) if they're the best available, and we've even used commercial software (perforce) where it serves a useful purpose.

There's bound to be some modern VCS that would be better
for them.

There were advocates within the FreeBSD community for each of SVN, Git, Mercurial. Really, we were all aware of the options.
Some of the bigger sites also feature multiple user accts
Cool - I always enjoy Rick Strahl's posts.
http://www.blummy.com/
"The bookmarklet management bookmarklet"

Sorry for the plug, but it fits well :) Since I wrote Blummy, I have not changed it much, but IMO it is still useful. The database contains 400 bookmarklets to add to your own blummy.

Also see http://alexander.kirk.at/2006/08/02/unknown-blummy-treasures...