skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On the subject :

Advice to Young Men from an Old Man http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/sfo/279126743.html

Things I wish I’d known when I was younger http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifestyle/things-i-wish-i’d...
Delaware is not terribly tax friendly. Delaware is a popular location to incorporate due to its long history of legal precedents with regards to corporate law.

I understand Nevada is a much more tax friendly state for incorporation.

That being said, I'm not an accountant or a lawyer, and either of those would have the appropriate advice for someone looking to incorporate.
But using instance.a is not wrong because you can override __getattr__. And if overriding __getattr__ is not the right thing then what you are writing is not a getter. Under no circumstances is it justified IMHO to write a get_X method. (And if your language doesn't let you override __getattr__ then you need a better language.) IMHO of course.
Everyone forgets about iTunes lock-in. If someone (in North America, Europe) is in the market to buy a smartphone, there's a good chance they're looking for a non-shuffle iPod replacement as well, and if enough of their library is in m4p format, the iPhone is their only option.

Secondly, while the Street View thing is neat, I can only imagine how horribly stupid it would look if you were standing on a street corner and rotating in place. People are just going to use the touch interface instead. The only real application for this sort of Street View interface is pervasive gaming.
Yes, it is a plain old method being executed in the context of the current class. It creates new class methods which can be used to read, but not write, instance variables.

There are methods to create read-write and (I think? write-only) properties as well.
“You should write about this on your blog”
Apparently what people want is not always good for them. That is for another discussion, though. I don't really know why that is the case.

It's also interesting in the light of advertising. So first you make people want something they did not originally want, and then you make a win-win trade because now it is something they want? Or is it not so win-win, because your ads distorted reality? (Note, this is not meant as an counter-argument, I am simply interested in this).
Frankly I'd rather have Wikipedia search that doesn't suck.
Computer Science Keynote Presentation: Is Search Broken?
I don't know if I can agree that copyright infringement is intuitively wrong as my own intuition tells me the exact opposite: Legal enforcement of an artificial scarcity on our cultural and intellectual artifacts so that a minority of individuals can personally benefit is morally incorrect.

Even if there was broad consensus that copyright infringement is 'intuitively wrong', intuition has a rather spotty track record for producing sensible normative ethical guidelines. Consider slavery, for example. It used to be so 'intuitive' that owning other humans as property was not morally problematic.
I don't claim this to be a hard and fast rule. It is obviously not impossible for Lispers to work together. My theory is just that Lisp tends to attract non-team-players more than C does, and the macro effect of this is that in the main C wins. There will, of course, be exceptions.
In my university training at least, we did have a thorough understanding of that distinction. We started with the relational algebra and went from there to actual database implementation.
The wiki is primarily discussing theory of administering a web system with a little bit about resource distribution. The ideas all have merit, but you need to decide how important they are. I, for example, don't mind having to upgrade a webserver, language and module simultaneously. I don't do this on production systems, so my services won't go down. I'll build the new system, test it, replace the old one and that's that. It's not really an issue to upgrade a few pieces of software together in the full scope of my testing processes.
Joy, a higher order Forth (or, "a brief and meaningless look at a language you don’t care about")
Wikia Updates Wikia Search - Allows Anyone To Edit Results
40GB for $55 per month: Time Warner bandwidth caps arrive
I am also in NYC, but I feel this fund will not work out. The problem is for East Coast VCs and Government funds, they are too timid to make themselves like fools. Unfortunately things are just like what PG said in his video that showed up yesterday in HN. "In technology venture funding, if you are too careful, you lose." Unfortunately, only few VCs such as Fred Wilson in East Coast have the courage to make themselves like fool once in a while but reap big rewards.

Of course, if this fund is run by Fred Wilson, then I will have more confidence, but it is not.
It's simple math.

total cost = time spent hunting + cost of item.

if (time spent hunting) is large but (cost of item) is small, then it's a good deal. If (time spent hunting) is large but (cost of item) is almost the same as buying fixed price, then ...

When ebay was just starting out, it was mostly people who wanted to get rid of their junk. It was stuff they were going to throw out anyway, and it was laymen who didn't always know how much things were worth.

So it was possible to get really good deals if you looked.

Now that ebay is saturated by people who are selling as a business, the variability in prices is much less. It has become too much a hassle to do the auction process, and the benefit of doing so is no longer as great as it used to be.

The concept of online auctions is not a fad. Ebay just got colonized by scammers and spammers, that's all.
I'd rather have $2 million and be able to relax about my taxes than have $4 million and be constantly in fear that I'm breaking some law I don't fully understand and could lose it all.

The more money it is the less I'd be willing to take the legal risk. And don't ever kid yourself that it isn't legally shady and risky.
$7b , a recommendation engine for everything (telecom, cable, cellphone etc..) service that was near perfect would still only be worth what someone is willing to pay for.

I think recommendation is at a place where "Good enough" keeps them from making huge acquisitions.
AH, ok. The postings to elance.com, etc, are for people to write ads for you.

Gotcha. That's no problem. I think Elance even has a category for writers and marketing-type stuff.

You might also try Craigslist job postings.
SkyNet Lives (aka EC2 @ SmugMug)
nice, how big is such a project in terms of time and people?
ebay will probably turn out to be like the shopping channel. CL needs to improve its signal-to-noise ratio or risk losing core users to social networking sites.
If false reports of Java's demise only have the effect of making some middle-managers think twice before instinctively reaching for Java, they will at least have done some good.

What I dislike is the easiness and frequency with which we label ourselves and others as X developers for any given language X. As much as I use Java and prefer to use Ruby, neither of those two language define me as a programmer.

People typically separate off into their different "communities", where the boundaries are programming language boundaries, and they remain as loyal as church members. Language loyalty can help a language become successful, but does it have a net benefit in the software industry?
What's the point of submitting this to HN? We know starter-uppers are young =)
MVC Public Service Announcement #1 - Controller Obesity
Gregg Pollack & Jason Seifer (http://RailsEnvy.com) team up with Adam Keys (http://FiveRuns.com) to bring you MVC Public Service Announcements. Film Production by Jason Hawkins (http://makefilmwork.com) and original music by Laura Balch (http://myspace.com/laurabalch).
For me, eBay was never about the auctions. I could care less about auctions - they're usually more of a nuisance than anything. It's about finding low-cost surplus or used products in a structured and organized shop.

It's a one-stop antique store, swap-meet, and Crazy Louie's surplus store. I'd much prefer for the sellers to lower their prices to attract the customers, rather than vice-versa.

If that's what they'll eventually evolve into, good on them.
The niche eBay serves: you want to get rid of something, but you want to not be the guy who sold for $5 what turns out to be a $500 collector's item. My guess is that those $500 collector's items are now mostly in the hands of the collectors, so that product isn't as great as it used to be. The fixed-price sales could take advantage of eBay's existing audience, but if the article is right, they've ruined that by letting their reputation system get out of whack. They're still valuable as a niche service for regret-minimization for sellers, and a ready supply of goods for antique retailers.
I use instapaper. I think its a pretty neat idea. Simple interface, great execution, now with a pseudo-social angle. Though I am not sure what this buys me over delicious
Boston VCs and CEOs -- Which Presidential Candidates They're Donating To
Ask YC: why is San Francisco "the leader?"
Everyone says it and I just watched an interview with Paul Graham and he says that Silicon Valley is clearly the leader. Why?
With the technology of communications these days (which will only improve), where you are physically located is becoming less and less important.
Could you list some reasons why it is still (and will remain) important to be physically located in Silicon Valley? Thanks.
Those caps seem pretty draconian. Key points:

* 768Kbps connection with a 5GB cap for $29.95 per month
* 15MBps with a 40GB cap for $54.90 per month
* Customers will be able to see how much bandwidth they have left by visiting the Time Warner Cable web site.
* $1 for each additional gigabyte consumed beyond the cap.

I worry that this won't scale well as streaming services become more and more common. That's bad news for startups expecting their customers to have flat-rate access.
Ask HN: Most Useful Bookmarklet?
Got any killer bookmarklets you like?

My favorite right now is "Instacalc", with "Zap Colors" coming in close second.
Hey, 22-year old self, you know all that stuff you're worried to death about? All those failures and existential crap that's keeping you awake? It doesn't matter. I know it really seems like it does but, trust me, it doesn't. No, not that stuff either: It really doesn't matter.

Now stop reading about mistakes to avoid and start discovering new ones to make by yourself. Those mistakes will end up perversely leading you to your greatest successes, but you can't make them if you try following someone else's retrospective perfect blueprint for happiness.
The biggest underlying reason is that newspapers are losing sales and consequently losing economies of scale.
StarF*#ked. (or, how not to handle forgotten password recovery flow during a massive promotion)
Google gets the importance of mapping, and location will be the crux of mobile data aggregation going forward. That being said, I don't think Apple doesn't get mapping. But I think only they can execute it smoothly and relevantly. Google, if given all the data in the world would still execute the UI like an engineer. That's great for the technorati, not so great for the mass. Apple gets UI and leans on Google for the back-end. Google still gets data, therfore: Google is still happy.

No need for a merger, and the fact that Android is still vaporwear shows that Apple has the advantage and doesn't need Google by any means. Google needs Apple to execute the front-end.
Like I said on reddit, I wish more companies would share this kind of information about how they consume cloud computing.
"total cost = time spent hunting + cost of item."

Some people enjoy the hunting! I think Omidyar decided that eBay would be huge when he watched people aggressively bid up his broken laser pointer. The one person I know who used eBay significantly talked way more about his sniping strategies than about what he ended up getting with them.
We (I run SlimTimer) went with a NYOP plan primarily because of we lack an obvious usage vector (ex: Projects) to limit and because it's hard to put a price on something after you've given it away for over a year.

A couple other implementation notes:

* We don't prompt users to upgrade until they're a couple sessions into the service. Asking for them to name a price up front would probably result in a much lower conversion rate.

* We don't give the users a blank box for price. Instead we compute a suggested price based on the number of hours they spend on the service.

Overall, I would recommend stating a fixed price up front (and we'll probably convert to this once we build in the concept of a project) but the results thus far have been decent. The average monthly payment is a bit lower than I would have expected but the conversion rate from regular to paying users is a bit higher.

I'm planning on doing a detailed write up of our findings on my blog in about a month or so.

and I probably wouldn't recommend it to other people
I spent the last 20 years spending 3 months a year living on a boat, I feel you - some of them are poorly done. I have seen many ship yards from the inside, from Sea Ray to Frers, and the higher end stuff is all done this way - but by high end we are talking $200,000+ for a dinghy and millions to make the mold for a full size boat. Bring that price down and cool things will happen. If you want to talk about it more email me at kevinsch@udel.edu, I'm very interested
Absolutely. The only real difference I could see is that object methods belong to classes in java, but methods happen to possibly work with objects in CLOS.

I prefer CLOS over Java because of the list of features, but the point I was trying to make is that different people (and even the same person at different times) have different ideas of what OOP is. This leads to funky designs and all kinds of messes.
Play the 3G iPhone prediction game!
Wouldn't it be easier to push a rental if it didn't do amazing at the box office. The odds that people haven't seen it yet are much better.
Welcome to the suck :(
Ask YC: What's the best way to set up and control Amazon EC2 instances on Mac OS X?  
What's the best way to set up and control Amazon EC2 instances on Mac OS X?
http://www.instapaper.com/ – definitely.
It's so darn useful.
I did not really have headaches with databases yet. One issue might be not having database drivers, though (LISP programming???). Another might be use cases that don't match databases well. For example I could imagine search engines would be better off saving their data in a different way (specialized index files). Or twitter-like things?
Exceptions: Tequila, mountain bike stunts and anything that didn't start to seem like a good idea until three drinks ago.
Wait, $1/GB after the cap? So it gets cheaper the more you use. Maybe I'm used to the cellphone model of obscene rates after the cap.

In any case, I'm glad I live in an area with decent ISP competition. If I was charged like this I would switch in a heartbeat.
Litmus Test of a Startup. Get Rid of your Marketing Team.
I guess I am talking about travel. But in the point about a house I'm also talking about relocation. A house and all the stuff you accumulate because of it seriously inhibits portability. I wish I had maintained a smaller footprint, so the idea of moving wouldn't seem so daunting.
This of course disregards the #1 reason to use mod_python (or mod_perl, mod_ruby, or any other fully-integrated scripting language Apache module): namely, because you're not just limited to generating dynamic content.

The Apache request-handling chain is much richer than simply passing off incoming requests to a CGI or PHP script. Using mod_{perl,python,ruby,etc.}, you can implement authenticators, URL-rewriting modules, log handlers, output filters, etc., and take advantage of the mature Apache infrastructure for such code.

Basically, if you want to be able to slice and dice HTTP requests at every stage of processing, not just the content-generation one, the Apache mod_* add-ons are a pretty powerful tool for doing just that.
I'd still like to buy things cheaper. The problem with ebay is that things are rarely cheaper than they should be. And for buying things new, Amazon has WAY better service (money back guarantee, insurance against item loss, easy payments, ...).
Spammers, rejoice!
The author doesn't write like a human. Was there any substance? It sounded like a couple paragraph's worth of "I can't just link to old stuff I've written! Perhaps some context about how great I am would help."

Summary, in case you're curious: the author gets ideas from friends, who tell her to write about them. She can't always do this. But sometimes she does! Also, the little gas-pump icon in cars shows you which side your car's gas tank is on.
What's great about eBay is that it's the storefront for people that sourced raw material goods from China and needed a way to get rid of it.

Want ODM tech products? eBay. Want 100 feet of kapton tape? eBay. Want one-off fad toys? eBay.
Thanks to this article I finally looked up Turkish Delight in Wikipedia. Turns out it's not sliced beef as I had assumed.

You learn something new every day.
I found it a nice read and thought others might like it.
Detractors of UTF-8 are just wrong, period. On modern machines, main memory bandwidth gives you about 10 cycles or more per byte of input of free processing. It's irrelevant. And it's important to note that "how many glyphs does this string contain" is a pretty obscure question to be asking in the first place. What's the problem being solved here?

The beauty of UTF-8 is that all (all!) of the common string operations continue to work as-is without change. strlen/strdup/strcat/strcpy? Yup, same behavior. Linear search for substrings or regexes? Yup, same behavior. Alphabetic comparison? Check. Just use it, and don't mess with encodings or you will mess things up. If you don't know how it works, just trust it. If you think you know how it works and still believe it doesn't meet your requirements, you're wrong.
http://searchyc.com/why+silicon+valley

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42933

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=174298
Its expensive but its fair. The connection I have now is as much as you want, until its too much, in which case we'll just cut you off without warning.

I believe I might actually prefer the expensive and fair model.
Maybe you want something like Berkeley DB aka. libdb

It's a library that you link to your application which exposes a database API for storing and retrieving records in tables (which are stored in files). No DB server is involved, and since you use the programmatic API, there is no need for SQL (and it's not supported).

Reference guide: http://www.oracle.com/technology/documentation/berkeley-db/d...
I'm glad I traveled when I was younger, but that seems to be the main point of this article/site... it's kind of an advertisement for itself.

Incidentally, does the background of the title look like Oregon's Crater Lake to anyone else? That is water I would not want to jump into... It's "cold, damn cold".
It's been discussed ad nauseum, but here's a summary:

1. Investors like to talk in person. They don't feel like the have the soul of a company until they've shook hands with the founders and had a few conversations. There is an old truism that being within 30 minute drive of an investor is the best indicator of whether they will fund your company.

2. Nerds and entrepreneurs like to talk. A lot. While HN is a lovely way to talk, it's also pretty low bandwidth and it has high latency. Talking to others is how you figure out your business, and in the rest of the world, talking about a startup "wastes your time and annoys the pig".

3. It's reasonably nice to live here, so a lot of smart people live here by choice. You have to hire smart people eventually. And not just nerds. You need lawyers who know about startups and will work on retainer. You need accountants who understand that you're an idiot about taxes and finance and need guidance. Basically, the friction of doing business is lower in the valley (SF isn't really the center of this magical place, though it's gaining lately...the center of the action is Palo Alto and surrounding regions).

4. Stanford. Stanford is designed to churn out technology startups. It has a great MBA program and a great comp sci program, and it is extremely involved in startup culture. I doubt any other university is as tuned to producing students who start startups as Stanford is.

There's probably other stuff, but I think those are the biggies...and the ones that can't be easily replicated by mere talent or ambition or stubbornness. Luck might do it. But realize that even lucky companies (like Boston-based and YC-backed Tsumobi) end up coming to the valley to get funded. Despite being in Boston, the second largest "startup hub", for a year since WFP07, they didn't get further funding until they came out to the valley to stay for a month...and Ron Conway spotted the raw intelligence they bring to the table.

The benefits of the valley are obvious after you spend some time here. Will it change? Maybe. But not fast enough for it to make a difference to your current company. It'll be decades, possibly more, before tech startups outside of the valley have the same odds as those in the valley.
I say its fair, but only if you charge fully by the GB or not at all; having a standard then add-on is trying to get the best of both worlds.
What struck me the most, when reading this article, is how thoroughly Microsoft has lost in the mobile space. Aside from mobile phones needing to interact with Exchange Server, Microsoft is increasingly irrelevant in the mobile space. At best they'll get to develop apps for the Android or iPhone platforms, but that must be a huge ego blow for a company that's used to being the platform-maker and not just another software vendor.
They will probably offer exception to websites owned/affiliated with Time Warner. This will encourage/force people to download streaming media using Time affiliated sites.
You must very smart to discover new mistakes.
And if you think you are then you are not.
Especially not a flash interface that prompts you to upgrade to Flash 9, when your browser works just fine on every other major site out there.
http://jellynyc.pbwiki.com/JellyInNYC
User generated content is worthless
Can America keep its innovative edge?
This is illegal to do. Content comapnies aren't allowed to merge or enter agreements with "delivery providers", unless there is a loophole.
The Future Is Now? Pretty Soon, at Least
I'd add: "Live someplace cool." Cool is a moving target, but I'm always blown away by people who spend their life in unremarkable places due to inertia.

For me, cool was Alaska for 10 years (a few years longer than I should've stayed, really). If you love tech, get to a place where tech is exciting. If you really love tech, that's probably SV. If you'd like to live someplace less crappy/expensive, that might be Seattle, Austin, or (if you can stand the East Coast) Boston.
Ray Kurzweil might be wrong about many of the future
developments he predicts, but I'll bet that's generally not because of technological issues.

..great quote : “My colleague Francis Crick used to say that God is a hacker, not an engineer,” Dr. Ramachandran said. “You can do reverse engineering, but you can’t do reverse hacking.”
consider using sqlite made for being an allmost universal fileformat also allowing transactions. Its fully
ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability)
and even allows concurrent access (serializes writes)

it's probably the most deployed "database" (thousends of embedded devices, it's the fs one some ;-) .
3% in games would be worth a metric buttload of money, where the difference in 'playable on N Ghz CPU' and 'playable on N - 0.2 Ghz CPU' could double your potential buyers.
Am I wrong, but didnt Time Warner pay 40 million for access to bittorrent last year with plans on distributing high quality movies online? This goes against what their goals are with regard to populating the web with high quality video. Maximum Suck!
Smutty Hedge Fund Buys iPorn.com