skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Embezzlement charges? Where is that coming from? If he doesn't have outside shareholders, he can change the structure of the company by fiat 10 times a day from a Rails-scaffolded web-app that generates new company documents, and it's all perfectly fine.
Delaware offers more protection if you get sued, but is not particularly tax-advantaged, nor is it the easiest place to incorporate. There are favorable tax implications to Nevada. Otherwise, as far as I can tell, picking a venue to incorporate in is a lot like picking a domain registrar: go with what's cheapest. Don't do NY --- you have to run an ad in the paper!
Oops... Wanted to vote you up not down...sorry. Can two people do me the honour of restoring my intent?

Thanks.
No. Aside from the fact it's unprofessional, it makes you look amateurish if the code ever ends up public. This happened with some YouTube code last year, if I remember correctly, and that is exactly what it made me think.
Don't get rolled. You can spend a lot more here than you want to at this stage of your company.

[Edit] You have an outside shareholder and non-founding fulltime employees. I retract my previous statement.
Oh, see, that "4 shareholders and two full time people" thing? That's a pretty important detail. =)

Do all the shareholders work for the company?

Are any of the FTE's NOT principals of the company?
SproutCore: Being talked of as a Flash killer? Really?
C# anonymous functions are true lexical closures, if that is what you are asking.
Addenda: is this perhaps the dumbest fucking question to be asked on this board? Fuckin' A right it is. Can someone draw a line between this topic and something that actually matters to a startup?
Fuck yes!

Just like the pros: http://www.jwz.org/doc/censorzilla.html
As for myself, I thought there was barely enough free content... I would have found it really cheap if you could only do the first 2 missions, especially since they're so easy. I didn't die before the 4th, which is significantly more challenging.
It is ok as long as only friends read it, "Haha, look, Johnny used a swear-word, he's such a witty guy" they'll say. But there may come a day that someone who doesn't know you reads that comment, without knowing you and your colorful personality and reading it completely out of context her first impression of you will be that you're a cantankerous old fart and she'll hook up with that dumb html-"programmer" instead.
I don't know, Objective C seems a relatively minor issue to me. (although I have to admit I don't know Obj-C either)

Right now, developing for the iPhone seems scarily similar to developing for a game console in the amount of politics and bureaucracy involved.
The only F word I ever see in my company's code base is FIXME.
Safari beats FF on a Mac (speed, UI, multi-touch, nicer rendering) while Opera simply destroys it on Linux. But on Windows FF is really sweet: it doesn't feel so terribly slow as it does on Linux and its less-than-perfect look matches Windows perfectly

P.S. In case anybody knows how to make FF scroll faster on a machine with 800Mz CPU with Compiz, please share! I need "800Mz scrolling" for laptops in power-saving mode under conservative scaling governor. It may be GTK+ issue, though. Qt-based Opera scrolls fine, pretty much instantly, mostly using GPU, just like it should.
I'm guessing deciding on the game's look&feel, designing and integrating the graphics and tuning the difficulty is the hard part.
Five Reasons NOT To Buy The 3G iPhone
I also can't help but feel like developing for the iphone is like developing for a soon-to-be-obsolete technology. I don't know when we should expect to see android phones, but I'm drawn to the openness of it and see an opportunity to become an expert before everyone else.
Startup Leaders: Are you a Missionary or a Mercenary
You work in a corporate environment don't you. You had to fill out a "comment request form" in triplicate just to post the above comment ;)

I'd say it depends. If you're working for bigco, swearing is probably not going to go down well with your boss, or co-workers. If you're working in a startup/open source project/on your own, then swearing can be good and useful IMHO.

If I swear in the comments of some code (Rare), I can instantly see that I've had some issues with that code, or something I'm interfacing to is idiotic and needs fixing etc.
Thanks guys. I downloaded it (who turns down a free download?) and was going to peruse it later this evening. You just saved me from forfeiting my free time.
Footbo.com: (Real) Football Social Network Kicks-Off
Do I swear under my breath when code doesn't run how I meant? Often.

Do I sometimes put dire warnings or florid descriptions of suckage or even rhyming couplets in my code? Yes.

Do I swear in code? No. Swearing is easy and imprecise. If I can't find a more useful way to convey my point, I'm obviously not firing on all cylinders and should take a break.

To be fair, nearly everything I work on is one or both of at least moderately interesting or for a good client. If I were working on something obnoxious for a boss I disliked, maybe I would swear. But even then I'd be more inclined to sarcasm.
Another game design criticism: I feel like the rooms where you start on a narrow path and get shot at from directly in front and have nearly no room to dodge... are kind of cheap.

It may just be me, but I much prefer the big rooms with obstacles and lots of baddies - they let me exercise a lot more strategy. The narrow corridor rooms just make me think "oh crap oh crap oh crap I'm going to get hit and there's nothing I can do about it!"

Perhaps in the sequel (if you do one) you can add moving platforms and rooms that change structure. Conveyer belts. Maybe a garbage compactor like in Star Wars. Muahaha.

edit: Also - perhaps more visual cue from the grenades? Maybe a little circle with trails. Also, try getting a few more explosions and picking them randomly instead of using the same one each time.
We aren't building tractors, we're "painting" software and do whatever makes us feel more creative. In fact some really great hackers I knew were very passionate about their code and coding process in general. Once we had a dedicated Yellow Pages book to throw in a brick wall (literally). That was awesome.

BTW, didn't you notice how often good programmers curse in public?

I suspect we work in different industries.
Developers ignoring Vista
Hi.

I recommend you meet with a lawyer familiar with this type of stuff. If you don't already know or have recommendations for a good lawyer, you can start by visiting your local Small Business Administration or SCORE branch to speak with people there for free. They can also give you some references.
True story:
During a summer internship years ago, I used Foo and Bar as placeholders throughout a web page comp. My boss sat me down for a serious chat about professionalism. Turns out he had never heard of Foo and Bar. Prior to that conversation, I had never heard of FUBAR.
The first employees would be principals. None of the initial employees would be principals, but we might need to hire if things go well.
British hacker should not be extradited to US, Lords told
I've heard more than one hacker speak about either ignoring or redefining "professionalism" (whatever that means):

JWZ: "I wear my unprofessionalism as a badge of honor." <http://www.jwz.org/doc/easter-eggs.html>;

PG: "Maybe some aspects of professionalism are actually a net lose" <http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html>;

PG*: "the way that he thought about professionalism did not differ from the thinking of a Mary Kay cosmetics saleswoman: wear nice clothes, drive a clean car, and don't say anything that might offend anyone" <http://philip.greenspun.com/ancient-history/professionalism-...;

We speak and write profanity in other contexts, so why not code? It shows respect for future maintainers that we're honest about what truly sucks, instead of watering it down. Plus, we don't care if clients or investors see that we don't wear suits (or even shoes); similarly, they care about what the code does, not what it looks like.
This is as close as I come, a comment from a few days ago:

> <%# All acesss to the message bar should go through the message()

> function defined above or kittens will be harmed %>
Looking for a site
I am looking for a site that I found many months ago, where people posted videos of the their start up companies. The companies name I think started with T. They were mostly software companies. I would appreciate if someone could reply to this email.
Put it this way: if every employee will receive 1099 distributions instead of a W2 paycheck, or if no W2 employee will formally be given equity to begin with, you're better off with an LLC.

If not, you were right to go for an S-Corp. It's just paperwork, and you're not going to screw yourself over with it. We're converting right now without a huge amount of legal pain.
How to Create a Business Plan for your Start-up
AOL was an LLC for quite a while. Might still be.
Thanks for the link and for telling me about SCORE!
I suppose that depends on your definition of life.

Not to downplay the results, as they are impressive, but replicating existing DNA does not qualify as "creating life" in my books.
Because YCombinator was acquired by Yahoo!

Or, probably because Yahoo Store maps /favicon.ico to its hosted sites. Examples:

http://store.triodestore.com/

http://infowars-shop.stores.yahoo.net/

http://www.pennwellbooks.com/

http://greenearthofficesupply.stores.yahoo.net/
I second SCORE, I've heard nothing but good things.
"a Rails-scaffolded web-app that generates new company documents"

Forget the company. I think I just found my entry for the next YCombinator contest. :-)
// No fucking clue why the below line is there
I would probably guess that this is because it is easier to develop for a nebulous piece of vaporware than an actual product platform. If you are developing for the latter then eventually people expect your code to work and ship, while for the former allows you to write endless blog posts about how your port of the Duke Nukem Forever engine is going to look...
http://pitches.techcrunch.com/
Who's going to be the Web's Tim Russert?
Are the twitter guys explaining their solutions to problems anywhere? I recall DHH saying scale is not an RoR issue, but twitter appears to have scaling issues on RoR.
the only profanities in my code are throw and raise
One interesting compiler bug later and your comment could end up in an error message.

Anyway I would only swear when I'm at home with a beer in my hand, so I only put swearwords in my code when I'm working at home with a beer in my hand ;)
Segway, Beta
This could be really useful in addition to the amazon reviews when book shopping. Looks clean, easy to use, and extremely responsive. Setting up an account to give it a test drive.
You know how some people swear casually, while others would cringe in shame if the apocalypse happened and a curse word passed their mouth?

Same for when they're writing code.

I don't quite get the shocked reactions.. I can understand thinking swearing is distasteful in certain contexts but would certainly never draw wider conclusions about a person because they swear. Then again, I'm Australian.
Could it be Vator.TV?
A side note:

When people who aren't brokers or traders are referring to companies by stock symbol rather than name, sell.
...almost as harmful as "considered harmful" essays:

http://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html
Y Combinator Dataset Of Posts And Users Version 1.5
A 112MB archive of Y Combinator posts is available by accessing http://www.rushy.com/ycombinator-news20080616.tar.gz and a 831KB archive of Y Combinator user profiles is available by accessing http://www.rushy.com/ycombinator-news-profile20080616.tar.gz
I strongly disagree with the first part of your argument and strongly agree with the second part, for a totally different reason.

First: your shares having a fair market value is a "win" condition. Before steady cash flow, even after the (unlikely) VC A-round, they don't really, no matter what you say. I wouldn't make practical decisions based on the eventual number attached to shares.

Second: do the loan, don't buy more equity. What can happen is, a year from now, that loan gave you more equity than your partners. The money seemed like a big deal when you gave it it, but now that you're making $300,000 a month, nobody cares. Now there's friction over the fairness of the equity purchase you made. Not worth it.
It's not a cell and it definitely isn't life; it's just DNA and few enzymes trapped in a lipid vesicle. People have been doing this for years.
"those who want to write great software, control the hardware." Hence Apple's focus on controlling the entire process...

The same shift has occurred in gaming with consoles taking over as the development platform of choice. So, I see the best cell phone apps existing on the iPhone for this very reason and furthermore, produced by significantly smaller studios. The iPhone SDK + iTunes distribution is a garage-programmers delight for anyone seeking to capitalize.

The problem with Android is the burden of designing around hundreds upon thousands of hardware combinations that exist in an open market. It also completely ignores the entire experience from distribution to installation on the phone; point A to point B can have a lot of barriers which has prohibited a sizable phone software market in the past. Apple has solved this too.
Would you want to play by Apple's rules? While I wouldn't want to be beholden to Google any more than Apple, Google doesn't own and control Android any more than Linus owns and controls Linux. Android avoids lock-in. Should Google move against you, screw them! You have their source code. Really, the manufacturers are the bigger obstacle and there are enough of them that they're unlikely to try as much as a monopoly would.

Apple's user-base is attractive, but it's also putting your eggs into a basket that can be taken away from you at any time. I love Apple, but I can understand why people would be hesitant to throw money in that direction.
in my book, fast boot falls under 'nice to have'.

And please; don't tell me you never reboot, I'll just laugh at you.
if it doesn't matter, why reply?
Scalling an application is easy. You just stick a load balancer in front of more and more webheads. The hard part is scaling a database!

Twitter is still running a single master database system and - from what they've put out - only three database servers. They might also have some pretty, but wasteful queries that do a lot of joins. Joins are not good for high-hit applications.
Hunh. Yuck. So how does that work at the instruction level? It seems like the generated code needs to take one of two wildly divergent paths depending on whether or not a scope includes a lambda or not. Either that, or you need to malloc the stack frame of every function that gets called, which is equally a mess.
I was wonder that myself. In my mind I was trying to parse "American Association of ... what? Programming Lanaguages?" until it clicked.
Hmf. My bugs have created seg-faults, memory leaks, etc., but never oil. I suck.
You might ask yourself the same.
abso-fucking-lutely
I think people have mis-understood my comment. I never said swearing was bad. Practically every word that comes out my mouth is a swear word. I just don't think swear words in code makes for "beautiful" work. I even have a go at developers for not putting full stops at the end of comments ;)

In addition, it's got nothing to do with working for a large corporation as I work for a small advertising software company with less then twenty employees.
The problem is that drawing energy out of crops is very inefficient. Plants are very good at generating the complex organic molecules we need to ingest in order to survive, but pretty inefficient when we just want lots of energy.

We need safer/cleaner nukes, in my opinion, and electric cars/planes + maglev trains for mid-distance transport. Nukes provide bridge energy during this probably permanent oil problem; better solar should be the ultimate destination.
I would say that's classless, engineering arrogance at best... there are better ways to flaunt intellect and respect, like by owning a night club.
It always stuns me when software developers say, "I don't know <language here>, so that isn't an option."

Good programmers don't learn languages, they learn methodologies. You don't learn how to program in Lisp, you learn how to program functionally with flexible syntax. You don't learn Objective-C, you learn how to write good code in a message-passing OO system.

Sure, the libraries can take some time to acclimate too, but this is our job! I just shake my head and sigh where I hear programming language is the barrier. I can never tell if it's a clever excuse for the press, or if people actually believe it.
"Blueprint's default width for all layout is set to 950px consisting of 24 columns (width units)."

Is there something similar that also works with dynamic screen sizes?
For example I want to create a two column based layout and make the first coloumn at least 4 to at most 6 width units large and let the last column takeup the rest, depending on current screen size of the user's browser window.
A hopelessly vague metric. Win32 apps designed for XP run just fine on Vista. Well-designed apps don't butt up against Vista security restrictions. And all they're really charting is the exodus of developers from thick clients to web apps.
You think people who build tractors don't swear? After my work in steel manufacturing, I would bet that there is some informal manual next to a machine that has at least one swear word in it.
Database sharding unraveled - part III
The third part of the high scalability episodes. Interesting info on functional partitioning and how sharding can really help even smaller web apps.
Interesting article, but hardly news 8 years after publication.
They may, when revenue for the Apple aps starts to come in.
Ballmer's biggest flop to date
Mass. Insight Releases Report to Help Mass Economy
Interesting points on trying to reinvigorate the massachusetts economy
sjvn seems to be on a campaign.
This whole discussion reminds me of http://www.pd.infn.it/~loreti/ootoaster.html
I used to ... until about 8 years ago when I response.write'd a large "FUCK YOU" in an asp app that I forgot to take out.

A big honkin' "FUCK YOU" that showed up during QA 5 minutes before client showed up for review.

Never again.
I work in post-production graphics, and when troubleshooting particularly nasty problems I've been know to name some of my project assets things like "WhattheHelliswrong.mov"

I would not recommend doing this, but it definitely made me feel better.
If you can stand typing command-F you'll find that Safari has an excellent feature that very visually highlights the found text. It dims the irrelevant parts of the page and highlights the found text with a very hard to miss box. This is my favorite Safari feature.
When /fuck doesn't find anything, I know my code is ready for 1.0
Django 1.0 Roadmap and Schedule
I think I would have purchased, had there been boss fights. Also, it's pretty easy to get yourself into a bad situation if you enjoy trying different weapon loadouts - since weapons sell for so much less than you buy them for, the more you experiment, the worse your gear. And there's a few rooms on the fourth level that are "Gear check" rooms - if you can't put out enough damage, you simply can't progress (narrow path, many blue enemy spawners).
Myth Journals — Story from "Myth" Games
Then they may go back to Android, when they realize Apple is taking 30% of their app revenue first.
To answer your primary question, it doesn't matter that you "set aside" funds to use for the business. As long as you can keep accurate records of what you spend on your business, you'll be fine from an accounting/legal perspective. As far as the legal structure of your company, you will probably want to choose from either an S-Corp or an LLC because both allow you to avoid being taxed twice. You mentioned you weren't seeking VC money, but even if you were, that shouldn't influence your legal structure choice too much. Here are the key differences:

1. Self-employment taxes: A primary advantage of an S-Corp is that you can avoid having to pay a portion of your self-employment taxes, if you plan on taking more than "a normal salary" for yourself from the business. (I can elaborate on this if you want.)

2. Acquired/Investors: S-Corp's sometimes make it easier to be acquired or to be invested in.

3. Ease of operation: LLC is very easy to setup and maintain from an administrative perspective. (I've always heard this, but admit I don't know exactly how "hard" an S-Corp is, paperwork wise, or how "easy" an LLC is)

4. Shareholder limit: S-Corp can only have 100 shareholders, LLC doesn't have this limit.

5. Profit distribution. S-Corp you must distribute profits in proportion to equity ownership. LLC can distribute however it wants. (This one seems odd, and although I know it to be a rule, I don't know the details of how its carried out or enforced)
To sat the title to this submission is a stretch is kind. Interesting article, nevertheless.
Cute, but the Segway "beta" was really a half-assembled iBot wheelchair.
The Objectives Of The All Partner's Meeting
The Objectives Of The All Partner Meeting: Inform
The Objectives Of The All Partner Meeting: Alleviate Concerns
The beginning and the end are up to you
"I can always tell if I'm on the right track if I'm having fun doing it."
Check Out
What good system are you using for checkout that is reasonably priced?
I like to keep track of the books I've read, but up til now I've just been using flat files stored hither and yon in various dark and unfindable corners of my hard drive. The system on bookhuddle is much, much nicer, themed lists integrated with the tagging system. I'm in the process of building up my lists. Tagging infrastructure makes this really easy, and in going through the process I've already come across (and tagged) several books that seem right up my alley. The ability to subscribe to other people's lists is key. Very cool app.
Interviewing for startups : are formal cover letters + suits necessary, neutral, or harmful?
When one is applying to a startup of less than 20 people, is it necessary to use a formal cover letter, or will a simple, polite email do? I dislike cover letters because they feel extremely artificial. In my CL template, I end up talking about how, in high school, I woke up at 5:00 am to practice for contest math tests (e.g. USAMO). It makes me sound impressive and hard-working to HR people, but as I'm 25 and that was in HS, this sort of detail is completely irrelevant to whether or not I can write code.

Also, is it a good idea to wear a suit for a startup interview, or is this over-the-top or absurd? I'm afraid that overdressing might make it appear like I don't know how to interview for startups or, worse yet, type-cast me as similar to the species of douchebag college kid that generally applies for I-banking positions.

If it's not necessary to use cover letters and wear suits for startups, the next question is: where does one draw the line? How does one determine in advance whether or not an interview necessitates a suit?
http://www.google.com/codesearch?hl=en&q=clusterfuck+sho...
A trio of super-Earths
It totally depends on the culture of the company. At my last job, my boss valued 'professionalism' to the point where even sarcasm wasn't tolerated (even though I was right). My current employer doesn't seem to care, but most of the swearing remains verbal instead of going into code.

I personally prefer not to swear outright, in code or otherwise, but it's only a preference.