skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hmm, I meant fair as in you know what you are buying for the money you are giving them because the declare it up front. Is this amount reasonable? Hell no. As has been stated above, these companies got massive tax breaks and subsidies (and sometimes monopoly powers) on the promise of limitless bandwidth and fiber everywhere. They have been essentially selling dial-up ever since. (At these caps, they still are). I call that stealing.

What I meant was, this is slightly more honorable than telling the customer that it is unlimited and then cutting off the account without warning when the magic undisclosed number is reached. This way the customer knows in advance that the service sucks monkey balls and can choose an alternative if possible.
Writing copy? Start with a classified
It's quite impressive to read a blog post that analyzes a competitor's announcement carefully (with no ill will), performs tests to show the validity of the analysis, provides the source for the test, and is written cleanly and concisely. I wish more posts on the internet were like this.
Why would your startup have directors that weren't employees? You aren't Alcoa.

Any startup which takes VC will have directors who are not employees.
I don't agree with that. Plenty of people go to college later in life.
You can't do everything at every time in your life.
I'd rather see the world when I have money to see it in a bit of style.

Everything shapes who you are from then on, and an experience like travelling may have a big effect on your later life. But so does being a parent, or starting a company, or any number of other big experiences. You just have to make a judgement as to which you want to experience first.

You could make a similar argument for having kids later in life - to some it doesn't any sense to wait until you're old and tired to have kids.
Vanuatu sounds the kind of place you are asking about.

This link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanuatu

Has this quote:

"Vanuatu is a tax haven that until 2008 did not release account information to other governments or law-enforcement agencies. International pressure, mainly from Australia, influenced the Vanuatu government to begin adhering to international norms to improve transparency. In Vanuatu, there are no income tax, no withholding tax, no capital gains tax, no inheritance taxes, or exchange controls. A disproportionately large number of ship-management companies choose to flag their ships under the Vanuatu flag, because of the tax benefits and favorable labor laws. Several file-sharing groups, such as the providers of the KaZaA network of Sharman Networks and the developers of WinMX, have chosen to incorporate in Vanuatu to avoid regulation and legal challenges."
Try Ultimahosts.net. It's true, there are less choices available for cheap ASP.NET hosting but Ultimahosts have got to be among the best.

You might have to ask to get it but they have shared plans that offer 400 MB storage, unlimited SQL databases, Dotnetpanel controls, unlimited domains + subdomains etc. and plenty of bandwidth to mess around for $15/month.

In fact, they don't seem to even track bandwidth.

My most memory-intensive sites are not on shared hosting but I have many smaller sites hosted on a single shared account. Good luck.
The mod down arrow has some sort of minimum karma threshold.
It depends on how much those folks will spend to reduce their pain. And then there's the wannabees who you might get to pay for junior versions.
The question is about monopoly, not search relevance.
I guess the interesting figure here is the yearly 2 * 3e+9 euros worth of business.
Very nice article, and I thank you. A couple of brief quibbles:

1) There is a more pedestrian reason why birds of a feather flock to a particular city, and that is fungible jobs. People in high tech, for example, change jobs very often, and knowing that one can do so with impunity because there are so many others like you and therefore so many companies is a major draw all in itself, and thus the community quickly becomes entrenched and self-perpetuating in some cases for that reason alone.

2) Aubergine in L'Auberge Carmel says "jacket preferred", by which they really mean "jacket required".

http://opentable.com/rest_profile.aspx?rid=3334

That said, and in defense of your article, the yahoo sitting next to us there a couple of weeks ago would probably have been lucky to be seated right next to the kitchen or bathroom door in New York. Collar undone, searingly bright yellow tie half-knotted, and he held an unlit cigar in his hand during the entire meal as he regaled his date (90% sure from an escort service) about his racing speed boats and such. It was some tragically failed attempt to revive the ring-a-ding-ding days of Hef hip, and it was painful to watch.

Lest you get the wrong impression, I'd rather have to see that sort of thing occasionally here in Silicon Valley and chew my own arm off than live in NYC or DC.

Lastly, a city with a great vibe, IMO, is Portland Oregon. The vibe seems to be: "This is a square hole for those of you who are not round like everyone else, and are tired of beating yourself bloody trying to fit into a round hole. Come here and be yourself and we'll hang together and appreciate each other's ingenuity. First round is on me."
To me, the most interesting part of the article was this:

LeSieur didn't create the browser by consulting with people who are considered experts in disorders on the autism spectrum. The small software company he runs, People CD Inc., essentially designed the Zac Browser to meet Zackary's needs, and figured that the approach would likely help other autistic children.

It seems to me that this was a questionable decision at best. It's great to design the product to meet his grandson's needs, if it is intended only for his grandson. However, if he wants it to be likely to help other autistic children, he really ought to be speaking to other domain experts in the field. There's no good reason, in my opinion, for cutting yourself off from the research.
Ask YC: Speeding up PHP
Just installed APC on our server (Alternative PHP Cache - http://uk2.php.net/manual/en/book.apc.php) and already seeing some great improvements in page load times/CPU usage per request. Particularly good for us as we're using Propel with lots of DB tables so already have 570+ .php files in the cache.

Any recommendations/gotchas, or should everything be fine out-the-box?

And while we're on the subject, what other recommendations have people got for speeding up/optimising PHP/LAMP?
The steam engine and Otto cycle both convert waste heat to kinetic energy. They turned out to be marginally useful.

I wasn't suggesting coating objects with an expensive material to collect ambient infrared radiation. I was thinking of solar or solar thermal power, since the article advertises the material as 'tunable black'.
How is what you're doing different from how insulin is manufactured (using yeast which has been genetically engineered to produce the relevant peptide)?
> What the..? Do your own thing instead of listening to your clients huh? Sounds like bread winning advice!

Clients != Customers, which was precisely my point. Clients and consulting is a linear growth curve, and difficult to grow into much of a business: add more clients and you have to add more people to do work for them. Customers and products (ala 37signals) means a hyper-linear growth curve, and a nice business.

A "startup" as most people mean it here is not a consulting shop. Clearly, if you are a consulting shop, you need to listen to your clients.
I would say odesk is is good for 1 reason only.... you can see snapshots of what the UI developer is working on as they do it. So you should be able to see if they are going down the right track early before they finish!

It depends if its pure GUI or UI ... I think you should split up the project into 2... GUI is to get design and colour scheme. UI is to get the interactions you want and the flow...

We have used odesk, and we found that we can get GUI design done, but UI is really dependant on your target user market... This is difficult to outsource unless you really direct what you want done...
It's not more relevant to hackers than other people. It's very relevant to hackers, miners, accountants, lawyers and everyone else. That's a good sign that it's not "hacker news". The key factor is relative importance, not absolute importance.
In response to all of our comments being heavily downmodded, (which I personally wish that the ability to mod was more integrated with the necessary requirement that a comment follow for the sake of conversation) I really hope that you could refute your point of view or why you so vehemently disagree rather than mod into the thread and conversation into oblivion so that no one else will see.

I really do believe that some important points were addressed in the conversation in relation to the validity and relevance to the hacker community for the conversation so I would hope that rather than mod down to where no one will see the conversation you express your opposing opinion. In the end a refutation will do more than silencing the opposition.

EDIT 1: Thanks to you all that have resurrected the comments in the thread (especially those that oppose the comments). It really would not bother me if every one in the HC community opposed those viewpoints, I am just glad to know that we could have a civilized conversation in the thread and that individuals will still be able to express their opinions in text rather than have the influence be based on votes.

EDIT 2: The conversation has obviously went from negative to positive for quite a while now (which would come with the assumption that it is quite controversial and polar topic), but once again, please establish your opinions rather than vote to where no one will read the viewpoints and comments expressed.
I can sum it up for you: they pretty much represent the normal political spectrum, but there are a lot more libertarians, and probably fewer Bush style conservatives. If you want to see the results of such a discussion: libertarians vs more left-leaning (a lot more in some cases) vs a few lonely moderates, have a look at reddit. It's generally not that entertaining, and I'd much rather talk about things we all have in common rather than those that divide us.
also if you have the design in a psd... you could try http://www.psd2html.com/order-now.html
It seems you can't have direct threaded interpreter for JVM or CLR where the opcodes conform to specification that can't change between versions of the interpreter.

The SquirrelFish announcement's list for future developments (http://webkit.org/blog/189/announcing-squirrelfish/) contains some more codewords I wish I understood:

- constant folding

- aggressive copy propagation

- type inference—both exact and speculative

- specialization based on expression context—especially void and boolean context

- peephole optimization

- constant pool instructions

- superinstructions

- instructions with implicit register operands

- advanced dispatch techniques, like instruction duplication and context threading
Best page i've seen around

http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html
Ask YC: Recommend a white label comment system?
My company has been looking for a good commenting system for general use across multiple parts of our site. We have been using Groupee for our forums for several years but until recently they have not offered a commenting system, though one is in development. It hasn't been released yet, so we want to explore alternatives along with theirs.

We have been trying out Jive for a new forum alternative since the beginning of the year, and while overall the forum system is excellent, its comment widget functionality is lacking. We have spent dozens of man hours trying to customize it to work with our existing member registration system but its been like putting lipstick on a pig.

I have talked to the founders of Disqus and their system can't integrate with our system to the degree we need.

I've looked at Intensedebate.com tonight and while I am impressed with some of the functionality, they are way too beta for my bosses to be comfortable with. I saw huge bugs with their system within 10 minutes of trying it out.

Are there any alternative commenting systems? We are more than prepared to host internally (we're already setup for Jive) or to use a third party system if it has good integration options?

For integration points:
1) Needs to integrate with our registration/user system.
2) Allow us to use our member profile images for avatars.
3) Advanced options that are wanted but not mandatory: Threaded comments, pagination, basic WYSIWYG text editing.

Thanks HN!
http://www.scribd.com/doc/88689/apcfacebook
How to fit 1TB of data on one tiny thumbdrive
FreeBSD starts switch from CVS to Subversion
awww. i wanted hillary to win, because she has bill
what other recommendations have people got for speeding up/optimising PHP

Use a different programming language.

No, seriously. http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all...

If runtime speed is your design goal, then you definitely want to think outside the PHP/Perl/Python/Ruby box. Those are fast enough for most people, but other languages are a lot faster. OCaml and Haskell are amazing; SBCL is pretty good too.
Where is MySQL ahead of PostgreSQL
Ask YC: How to assemble a good team?
Do you have any guidelines to choose a good teammates? Do you choose people who you can get a long well or with good knowledge on the work?
I think ultimately, software like this makes for interesting stories, but little more. Kids like this need voice recognition, and multi-touch. Sugar Labs is doing great stuff, but I think that hardware and basic HCI paradigm shifts should be the focus.
make founders firable "at will" instead of "for cause", so if one founder is acting up the others can kick him out to satisfy any defintion of "leaving" and that's that

Note - this is _highly_ dangerous in the presence of outside investors such as hard-nosed VCs. Unvested options cause reverse dilution, meaning there is an active financial incentive to your investors to kick out a founder with a lot of stock if they think they can get by without you. Venture Hacks generally recommends accelerated vesting on termination, for this reason - check out http://venturehacks.com/term-sheet-hacks#vesting
There is no right answer. Despite what others say, php is perfectly suited for a lot of needs. Runtime may be your issue, but you also have to think of supportability.

If your looking to optimize your site, as messenlinx suggested yslow is a good place to start. Next, I would suggest looking at your queries, ie a select statement across a big table vs. a more refined query across a smaller data set will do wonders regardless of the language.

If your data is updated infrequently, you can look at caching your queries in the data level. If not, maybe look at memcached?
There has to be a better, quicker way to choose a new president. This is worse than big brother (the tv show).

Is it any wonder so few vote when they have to endure years of this before hand?
If education could be solved by the government it would be well worth eliminating many potential startups in the education space. It would make more opportunities for startups, because everyone would be more educated, producing more wealth to spend.
The rampant down-modding for differing political views on this thread (which has no business being on Hacker News in the first place) is ridiculous.
Is food in a box from Amazon good for you? I honestly know nothing about the product. It just sounds kind of weird that the healthy choice in this story is that.
I'm not a flash guy so I'm not sure about this, but isn't it possible to decompile flash?
No need, I released the source as GPL. It was legal for them to just take it.
Very slick javascript user interface.
you have a lot of determination
I agree. If people want to push their political views, I suggest doing it over here: http://www.createdebate.com/debate/show/Who_is_going_to_be_t...
Anyone used MaxMind Geolocation library? Have alternate suggestions?
I'm looking for a (fast) way to tell the region/city of an IP address and came across MaxMind Geolocation http://maxmind.com .

They have a free version and a commercial version. I was wondering if anyone had used it, or had alternative suggestions.

One interesting thing is that they require that you install some C library to query a downloadable binary which contains the IP block data. They also provide APIs in all the popular languages. The queries seem fast...looks like you can look up ~hundreds per second which is what I need...
interesting link.. thanks
Why Subversion? The only reason for using Subversion is that you're already using Subversion; for "new conversions" it's widely agreed that anything but Subversion is the right thing to use.

I don't want to sound cynical, but could FreeBSD be avoiding Git because Linus wrote it?
Building on someone else's work is "evil" now? Where I come from, we call that "progress."
They're probably avoiding git because it's GPL. They're awfully picky about that sort of thing. But yes, I had the same reaction. There's bound to be some modern VCS that would be better for them.
Here's the link:
http://www.maxmind.com/app/geolitecountry
Ask YC: What kind of hours do all of you hackers work?
I'm curious to know because I work in Honolulu for a new startup, and there aren't many of us down here. I actually "technically" work for two startups, so that makes it even harder because both of them need 110% percent of me and at this stage in the game its not possible to leave either of them (despite how, in any other circumstance, it would be better for both parties to give up on one)

Anyways, here's what my sleep schedule looks like.

Usually the weekends get my pretty screwed up, because I will be awake until the sun comes out. It's not the smartest idea because I'm actually not that efficient if my sleep schedule is constantly changing, but like I mentioned earlier, two projects means balls to the wall all the time and im having a hard time getting a grip on everything.

I tend to sleep for a while, generally forcing myself to get out of bed after 6 hours or so, then its back at it. During the work week (my real "job", the startup here in Hawaii) I tend to get in around noon every day or later, and then work as late as I can before heading home to work on the other project. Most of the people in this environment are 9-5'ers (or even worse, in Hawaii the city is alive and full speed ahead by 6am every day, and shuts down at 4).

What do you guys do up in the Silicon Valley? Are you more of the type that just work as long as you can, sleep for any amount of time, and get back at it? Do you try and keep a regimented schedule? I'm anxious to hear about all of this because sleep and time and all that is related is really the story of my life right now. hah.
Warning: Posting in the thread for Obama winning the presidency will get you downmodded uselessly.
also good for optimising that side of things is http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/webapps/serving-javascr... - and in fact Cal Henderson's whole book has been a great read - http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596102356
Being able to choose a place to live strikes me as so American; reading the article I realized I've never considered the possibility of living anywhere else than where I was born (Paris). In fact my mother was born less than half a mile from where I was raised, and today I live less than two miles away from there, 35 years later.

I feel a little bit like a tree: if I move I'll probably die; besides, what's the point of traveling if you don't come back to your friends to tell them about what you've seen?

The "virtual city", however, changed everything; I check Reddit everyday (or more accurately, every minute! damn addiction), watch The Daily Show, read Slate; the problem is I have a hard time finding people to talk about it.
Ask YC: How do you build a bookmarklet?
I a non-programming founder trying to contribute towards the development of our web app and tonight I was trying to create a javascript bookmarklet to easily submit content to our Social News from my Firefox toolbar. My search skills are not too bad, but I couldn't find something that worked for me. I still have a lot of questions unanswered. Hence I decided to ask you, the all knowing YC crowd.

Any help?
Well, if you want a job at Google working on Photosynth for Google Earth, you could try asking them...
Well... point release might be the wrong term. I usually think of that being the third number. I guess I meant "minor version release".

Hence, not a major overhaul. Perhaps a minor one. I usually take the first number to involve some large-scale shift in the architecture of the thing, the second number to be minor API changes, and the third to be bugfixes and security updates.
"In Boston they ask, How much does he know? In New York, How much is he worth? In Philadelphia, Who were his parents?" -- Mark Twain

It's funny how little has changed in more than a century...?
NewsTrust and HuffPo partner for John McCain 'news hunt'
This is a good wisdom of the crowds type technique for a news credibility startup and it is good PR at the same time.

http://www.newscred.com/ is a startup from a founder on this site that is also working on news credibility.
Since you mention discountasp.net I wanted to say that, for most people, discountasp.net is the most expensive shared hosting you can find. I've been very disappointed w/ the quality of service from every shared host I've used in the past two years - and by "service" I mean both the speed and the technical support. I'm exclusively an ASP.NET person so I don't have experiences w/ php hosts to compare against.
In my experience, elance is not the place for large jobs (and I've tried). I would strongly suggest people not start out w/ a large job on elance and instead start w/ smaller piecemeal-type work.
Estimating the duration of software projects
Hi,

All my guestimates of project duration have been so far ridiculously optimistic and I usually err by a factor of 4x or worse.

Is there any way out of this? How can I improve my estimates? Is there ANY book or technique worth learning?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Have you seen this wikipedia page? It has some good references:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookmarklet

The basic idea is that you create a link on your page that points to a "javascript:" URL. This link can become a bookmark just like any other link. The javascript in the link's URL implements your bookmarklet functionality.
What a great concept. Too bad its only for Rails...
the evil was not referencing the original work
I like the one for http://faves.com, primarily because it's the social bookmarking app most of my friends use. Del.icio.us is the other one.